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STRATFORD-ON-AVON 




Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-on-Avon. 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES 
TO THE DEATH OF SHAKESPEARE 



BY 

SIDNEY LEE 

AUTHOR OF 
'A LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,' ETC. 



WITH FIFTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS CHIEFLY BY 
HERBERT RAILTON ^ EDWARD HULL 



NEW AND REVISED EDITION 
WITH A NEW PREFACE 



PHILADELPHIA 
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 

LONDON: SEELEY & CO. LIMITED 

1907 



p^ 



^ 



\Cs> 










Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION 

At the publishers' request I have read over 
these pages, v^hich I first wrote one-and-twenty 
years ago, and subsequently — in 1890 — revised 
for a second edition. 

I have now endeavoured to bring the infor- 
mation at all points up to date, and to embody 
the fruit of all recent researches which seem 
to me pertinent to the original scheme. For a 
fuller account of the great dramatist's biography 
than falls within the scope of a contribution to 
the history of his native place, I may perhaps 
be permitted to refer readers to my Life of 
Shakespeare, which was first published in 1898, 
and has been many times reprinted. At the 
same time this monograph presents much social 
and historical detail, necessarily excluded from 
the Life^ which may help in the graphic realisa- 
tion of the local and domestic influences which 
affected the poet's career. 

My association with Stratford-on-Avon has 

V 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

recently become very close, for in 1903 I was 
chosen, by the goodwill of the Trustees and 
Guardians of Shakespeare's Birthplace, chair- 
man of their Executive Committee, and my 
colleagues have since annually re-elected me 
to that honourable and responsible office. More 
intimate acquaintance has served to intensify 
my interest in the town and its memories, and 
it is no small satisfaction to me to fill, for the 
time being, a position which imposes on its 
holder the enviable obligation of very frequent 
visits to the scenes amid which Shakespeare's 
youth and age were passed. 

SIDNEY LEE. 

31 July 1906. 



VI 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

INTRODUCTORY 13^ 

CHAP. I.— THE ORIGIN OF THE TOWN, AND ITS 
RELATIONS WITH THE SEE OF WOR- 
CESTER . . . . . . 20 

,, II.— AGRICULTURAL LIFE .... 27 

,, III.— MEDIEVAL TRADE, MARKETS, AND 

FAIRS 35 

,, IV.— JOHN, ROBERT, AND RALPH OF STRAT- 
FORD 43 

,, v.— THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY 48 

,, VI.— THE GUILD 62 

,, VII. — SIR HUGH CLOPTON'S BENEFACTIONS . 86 

,, VIII.— THE REFORMATION AT STRATFORD . 98 

,, IX.— THE GROWTH OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 103 

,, X.— JOHN SHAKESPEARE IN MUNICIPAL 

OFFICE AND IN TRADE . . .115 

,, XL— THE STRATFORD INDUSTRIES AND 

POPULATION 122 

,, XII.— JOHN SHAKESPEARE'S FIRST SETTLE- 
MENT IN STRATFORD— THE STREETS 128 

,, XIII.— THE CONSTRUCTION AND FURNITURE 

OF THE HOUSES— THE GARDENS . 140 

vii 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

PAGE 

CHAP. XIV.— THE SANITARY CONDITION OP THE 

TOWN 161 

,, XV.— PLAGUE, FIRES, FLOODS, AND 

FAMINE . . . . . . 169 

,, XVI.— DOMESTIC AND SCHOOL DISCIPLINE 183 

,, XVII.— THE OCCUPATIONS OF STRATFORD 

LADS 199 

„ XVIII.— THE PLAYERS AT STRATFORD . . 208 

„ XIX.— RURAL SPORTS 215 

,, XX.— CHARLECOTE HOUSE— POACHING IN 

THE PARK . . . . .227 

,, XXL— INDOOR AMUSEMENTS . . . 248 

,, XXII.— CHRISTENINGS AND MARRIAGES . 261 

,, XXIIL— SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD IN 

LATER LIFE 272 

,, XXIV.— THE GUNPOWDER PLOT— COMBE'S 
DEATH— THE ATTEMPT TO EN- 
CLOSE THE WELCOMBE FIELDS . 290 

„ XXV.— SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH AND HIS 

DESCENDANTS 301 



vui 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAOE 



The Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-on- 

Avon Frontispiece 

Aston-Cantlow Church 36 

The Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford, 

from the Avon 50 ^ 

The Church of the Holy Trinity, from the 

North 54^ 

The Church of the Holy Trinity, from the old 

Lock 58 

Remains of the old Font at which Shakespeare 

was christened 61 

The Chapel of the Guild, from Chapel Street . 68 

The Guildhall, Interior 74 

Some Remains of the old Building at the rear 

of Clopton House 88 

The Chapel of the Guild, Interior . . . 92 

Stratford Bridge 94 

B ix 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

Staircase of Clopton House .... 
Luddington Village and uew Church . 



PAGE 

97 

100 



The Chapel of the Guild, Guildhall and 

Grammar School 104 



Shakespeare's Birthplace before restoration 

Snitterfield Church 

Ground Plan of Stratford in 1759 . 
Old Houses in High Street . . . 
Back of a House in Church Street 



129 
130 
132 
140 
144 



The Upper Story of Shakespeare's Birthplace . 148 

The Birthplace of Shakespeare in Henley 

Street 152 

The Room in which Shakespeare was born . 156 

Old Houses in Bother Street 162 

The Avon at Stratford . . . . . . 172 

Old Lychgate at Welf ord . . . . . 176 

The Grammar School and Guild Chapel . . 184 

The Grammar School, Interior .... 194 

Charlecote, from the Park . . . . . 204 

X 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Mary Arden's Cottage at Wilmcote 
Charlecote Bridge .... 



Charlecote, from the Terrace 
Charlecote, the Porch 
Charlecote, the Terrace Front 
Charlecote, the Gatehouse 
Charlecote, from the Gatehouse 
Charlecote, the Pleasance 
Charlecote, the Turret Stairway 
The Arms of Lucy . 

Bidford 

Hillborough .... 

Charlecote, the Stables and Bellcote 

Anne Hathaway's Cottage at Shotter 

Anne Hathaway's Cottage, Interior 

Old Church at Luddington . 

The House of Dr. John Hall, in Old Town 

Charlecote, the Great Hall 

The Clopton Pew 



PAGE 

216 

228 

230 



236 

288 

242 

244 

246 

247 

250 

254 

256 

264 

268 

271 

280 
282 
286 



XI 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 



PAGE 



Clifford Church and old Houses .... 290 

Monument to Sir Henry Rainford in Clifford 

Church 294 

Old Gravestones in Stratford Churchyard . . 302 

Chancel of the Church of the Holy Trinity . 306 

Shakespeare's Monument 310 

Chancel of the Church of the Holy Trinity, 

Exterior . 314 

The Chapel of the Guild of the Holy Cross . 318 

Stratford from the South-east .... 321 

Map of the Neighbourhood of Stratford in 1610 



Xll 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

INTRODUCTORY 

' One thing more,' wrote Sir William Dugdale 
in 1657, at the close of the eighteen folio pages 
of his Antiquities of Warwickshire devoted 
to Stratford-upon-Avon, ' one thing more in 
reference to this ancient town is observable, 
that it gave birth and sepulture to our late 
famous poet, Will Shakespeare.' There is 
little need to add the comment that the *one 
thing more,' about Stratford, which the learned 
antiquary thought to have adequately noticed in 
these four-and-twenty words, has grown into the 
only thing about it that most men now regard 
as memorable. Nor would the modern pilgrim 
— that is, he who makes his pilgrimage with 
fitting judgment — readily admit that Dugdale 
has indicated the highest points of interest 

13 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

about Shakespeare's connection with Stratford. 
That the borough was his birthplace and burial- 
place gives it, after all, a smaller attraction than 
that he lived there for full two-thirds of his life. 
And completely as the resources of civilisation 
have remodelled the town in many of its 
aspects, it still boasts sufficient survivals of the 
age of Elizabeth to give the sojourner a far-off 
glimpse of Shakespeare's daily environment. 
The nineteenth-century manufacturer has not 
set his mark upon it : the inhabitants know 
little of life at high pressure. Their acknow- 
ledged affinity with the hero who makes their 
life worth living in more than a single sense, 
would seem to have held them aloof from all 
the ruder currents of modern life. It is only 
within the last half century that the town has 
begun to extend its boundaries, and the exten- 
sion has not yet attained very gigantic measure- 
ments. The chief streets, with their offshoots, 
although they have grown wider in many places 
and in all cleanlier, still bear the names by 
which Shakespeare knew them. The church 
on the river bank has undergone little change, 
and time has dealt very kindly with the exterior 
of the ancient Chapel of the Guild, with the 

14 



INTRODUCTORY 

Guildhall, and with the Grammar School, all of 
which were once overlooked by the windows of 
Shakespeare's far-famed house, at the meeting 
of Chapel Street with Chapel Lane. Although 
that house has gone, the public garden chris- 
tened after it New Place occupies the exact site 
of the ' great garden ' that surrounded it when 
the poet was its owner. Cross-timbered houses, 
with the carved front in one instance at least 
merely mellowed by the lapse of years, often 
break the monotony of unlovely stretches of 
modern brickwork. The stone bridge across 
the Avon is in all its essentials the same as 
when the Elizabethans crossed it. The water- 
mill, although shaped anew, continues to do the 
noisy work in which it has persevered through 
nine centuries. 

And when once the town is deserted for 
Shakespeare's playing fields in the neighbour- 
ing country, the changes grow less marked. 
Stratford always stood upon a 'plain ground,' 
as Leland described it early in the sixteenth 
century, surrounded by ' the champain,' that is, 
the flat open country. The woodland has grown 
scantier, but there is still no lack of it on the 
low hills of the district, and here and there 

15 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

on the banks of the river. The Forest of 
Arden, which was in its decadence in Eliza- 
bethan England, has now retreated into a mere 
name, but it was always in historic times cut off 
from Stratford by a wide enough tract of land 
to prevent it from affecting materially the im- t 
mediate scenery. The Avon itself winds as of ' 
old from Naseby to the Severn, with Stratford 
on its right bank, midway between its source 
and mouth, and at a little distance from Strat- 
ford it still flows under bridges at Binton 
and Bidford, which are as authentic relics of 
the sixteenth century as their fellow at Strat- 
ford. Numberless villages, like Shottery and 
Snitterfield, pursue that drowsy rural life which 
seems always able to resist time's ravages. 
They have not grown: some of them have 
been renovated by the modern builder ; in a 
very few cases they have fallen into decay 
and all but disappeared. But none have quite 
reached la fin du vieux temps ; and the pre- 
servation of an occasional relic like the may- 
pole on the village green at Welford suggests 
to the least thoughtful passer-by their near 
relationship with the past. Saunter where we 
will by the homesteads and meadows of South 

16 



INTRODUCTORY 

Warwickshire, we are still led from time to 
time within view of scenes which may well 
have inspired poetic passages like Perdita's 
invitation to the sheep-shearing feast, or the 
song of spring in Loves Labour 's Lost, 

But there is some danger, although the 
practice is an attractive one, in making Shake- 
speare's name the central feature of all Strat- 
ford history and topography. It has been done 
too often already. The writers of guide-books 
or monographs on the town and district have 
always endeavoured to fix the attention of the 
pilgrim or student exclusively on points of 
Shakespearian interest, and have valued only 
as much of their investigations as belongs to 
Shakespearian lore. 

The scraps of information that their labours 
have yielded are of their kind beyond price; 
but they fail to enable the reader to form a 
coherent conception of the town's general 
development or social growth. With all respect 
to the antiquaries of Stratford, it may be said 
that they have overlooked facts in the various 
stages of the history of the borough which 
are of striking importance in the municipal 
history of the country. Nor is this the limit 
c 17 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

of their offence, if offence can justly be 
used in such a context. Although it would 
be only by an awkward distortion of the 
neglected facts that they could be turned 
to account in Shakespeare's biography, those 
of them that relate to the Middle Ages un- 
doubtedly offer us traditions which influenced 
the life and thought of the poet as a 
Stratford townsman of greater receptivity 
than his neighbours ; while those that con- 
cern the late years of the sixteenth century, 
or the early years of the seventeenth, can 
be made to create for us a picture of the 
society in which he actually moved. Thus 
we may be brought to the conclusion that 
something of Dugdale's method of dealing 
with Stratford is not without its advan- 
tages for the Shakespearian student. It is 
possible that an account of the town that 
shall treat it as a municipality not unworthy 
of study for its own sake, and shall place 
Shakespeare among its Elizabethan inhabit- 
ants as the son of the unlucky woolstapler of 
Henley Street or as the prosperous owner of 
New Place, will be more suggestive and in 
better harmony with the perspective of history, 

18 



INTRODUCTORY 

than a mere panegyric on the parochial relics 
as souvenirs of the poet's birthplace, home, 
or sepulchre. The following pages are in- 
tended as an experiment in the former direc- 
tion. 



19 



THE ORIGIN OF THE TOWN, AND ITS RELATIONS 
WITH THE SEE OF WORCESTER 

There are many towns in England that can 
claim greater antiquity than Stratf ord - on - 
Avon.^ The county of Warwickshire, called 
by Drayton (himself a Warwickshire man) the 
heart of England, was doubtless in prehistoric 
ages part of the vast forest which covered all 
the Midlands, and which survived in later times 
in the chain of wood stretching, with occasional 
clearings, from Byrne Wood in Buckingham- 
shire, through Abingdon and Wych Woods in 
Oxfordshire, to the forests of Dean, Arden, 
Cannock, and Sherwood, and the Derbyshire 

1 The main authority for the history of mediasval Stratford is 
Dugdale's account of the town in his History of Warivickshi7'e, 
first published in 1656, and reissued under the editorship of 
Dr. William Thomas in 1718. Kemble's Codex Diplomaticus 
gives the text of the charters noted below. 

20 



THE ORIGIN OF THE TOWN 

Wolds. The discovery of a very few tumuli 
in the district, containing some rude stone im- 
plements, mark the presence of a very sparse 
population in a neolithic age. 

Avon is the Celtic word for river, which as 
Afon is still good Welsh. Arden is formed from 
the Celtic ai^d, high or great, and den, the wooded 
valley — a compound which also supplied Lux- 
emburg with its district of the Ardennes. Place- 
names like these prove the sojourn of Celtic 
tribes in the north and south of Warwickshire 
before the Roman occupation. The Romans 
bestowed the title Cornavii on the inhabitants 
of the county. We know nothing of its origin, 
and find few traces of Roman civilisation in the 
district. But Rome's ubiquitous roadmakers 
did not leave the neighbourhood untouched. 
Ryknield Street, which ran from Tynemouth 
in Northumberland, through York, Derby, 
and Birmingham, to St. David's, skirted the 
Forest of Arden on its west side ; passed 
through Studley and Alcester, and left the 
county five miles below Stratford by way 
of Bidford. The name of Straetford is a proof, 
too, that this was not the only ' street ' which 
approached the site of Stratford. It must 

21 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

have started into being like five other vil- 
lages in different parts of England similarly 
named, as the approach of a Roman street to a 
ford — as the approach to a ford across the Avon 
of the smaller Roman road that ran from Bir- 
mingham through Henley-in-Arden to London. 
But whether it had become an inhabited place, 
or had its name before the Romans left Britain, 
is mere matter of conjecture. 

Of the Teutonic settlers, a Saxon tribe, 
known to history as the Hwiccas, occu- 
pied Warwickshire and its neighbourhood 
in the sixth century ; but according to local 
legends, the Celts did not make way for 
them without a struggle, which was waged 
very fiercely up the Welcombe Hills that 
overlook Stratford. For some years the 
Hwiccas lived in independence under their 
own alderman ; but in the seventh century 
they were absorbed within the great March- 
land — the middle kingdom of Mercia — 
and their aldermen declined into mere 
agents of the Mercian kings. The see of 
Worcester was formed about 679, and all 
the district of the Hwiccas constituted the 
bishop's diocese. 

22 



THE ORIGIN OF THE TOWN 

The seventh century all but closes without 
supplying us with any authentic details as to 
the rise of Stratford. The earliest docu- 
mentary clue to its origin is to be gleaned 
from a charter dated 691, according to which 
Egwin, the third Bishop of Worcester, 
obtained from Ethelred, King of Mercia, 
' the monastery of Stratford,' standing on 
land above three thousand acres in extent, 
in exchange for a religious house that the 
bishop had erected at Fladbury, in Worcester- 
shire. The best critics have doubted the 
authenticity of the document, but another 
charter of unblemished reputation, dated nearly 
a century later, supports its statements, and 
leads to the inference that Stratford owes 
its foundation to a monastic settlement. In 
781 Offa, the great King of Mercia, con- 
firmed, after much discussion, the right of 
Heathored, the Bishop of Worcester, to 
* Stretforde,' then an estate of thirty hides ; 
and in 845 another ruler of Mercia absolutely 
surrendered to another bishop the Stratford 
monastery by the Avon, to be held by him 
and his successors free of all secular obliga- 
tions. This is the latest glimpse we obtain of 

23 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON ^ 

this foundation, and it, perhaps, afterwards 
fell into decay. The Bishops of Worcester, 
like many others of their profession, doubtless 
found it more to their interests to foster a 
new village, aud to cultivate the land about 
it, than to maintain monks who could not 
readily be turned to profit. According to 
tradition, this early monastery stood on the site 
where the church stands now, and, as in many 
other parts of England, the first houses at 
Stratford were probably erected for its servants 
and dependants. Their abodes were doubtless 
near the river, in the street that has for many 
centuries been known as ' Old Town.' 

The Saxon Bishops of Worcester were 
evidently proud of their Stratford property, 
and they sought with success to extend its 
boundaries in all directions. Records prove 
that the land was rich in meadows, pastures, 
and fisheries, and was well watered by shallow 
brooks. It was at no distant date that the 
bishop's original property, which included 
only the immediate environment of the mon- 
astery, obtained the name of Old Stratford, 
to distinguish it from a newer Stratford-on- 
Avon, which stretched far along the north 

24 



THE ORIGIN OF THE TOWN 

bank of the Avon. Thanes, who were the 
country gentlemen of Anglo-Saxon society, 
willingly rented under agreements for two 
or three lives large plots of ground of the 
bishop, and a few neighbouring villages retain 
in their nomenclature traces of this occupation. 
Alveston, originally called Eanulfestun, was the 
homestead of Eanulf, its tenant in 872, under 
Bishop Wearfrith. Bishopston (Bishopestune) 
was doubtless the site of a small homestead 
erected for the bishop's own residence. All the 
fertile land about Clifford was let in 988 to a 
Thane Ethelward. 

Thus, before the Norman Conquest, Strat- 
ford had become a valuable portion of the 
property of the see of Worcester; and in this 
condition of dependence it remained till the 
Middle Ages closed. It appears to have been 
little disturbed by any of the political convul- 
sions that overwhelmed many parts of Anglo- 
Saxon England in the ninth and tenth centuries. 
The Danes may have threatened it from a 
distance while passing from the conquest of 
Mercia into Wessex, on their first great expedi- 
tion ; but little is known of their route. There 
can be little doubt that the tale of Warwick's 
D 25 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

legendary hero, Guy, embodies some authentic 
tradition of a Mercian warrior who success- 
fully resisted the Danish invaders in the tenth 
century. Perhaps to him the Stratford towns- 
folk may have owed their immunity from the 
second invasion of his kinsmen in the tenth 
century ; and he may have at times come among 
them on returning from hunting or hawking 
in the forest of Arden, of which his friend 
and tutor Harald or Heraud, according to the 
popular romance, was a native. 

It is certain that the Norman Conquest passed 
almost silently over South Warwickshire, and 
Stratford showed little sign of its passage. Its 
lord at the time was Bishop Wulfstan, who was 
famed for his holy life, and was alone of all the 
Anglo-Saxon prelates rewarded for his ready 
acquiescence in the new dominion with continu- 
ance in his office. He proved his gratitude by 
twice leading his militia, his county tenants, some 
of whom doubtless came from Stratford, in 
battle against the Norman king's enemies — once 
against the half- Breton Earl of. Hereford, who 
sought to escape from William's yoke during his 
absence in Normandy in 1074, and once near Wor- 
cester against rebels from the Welsh border. 

26 



II 

AGRICULTURAL LIFE 

In 1085 the first distinct account of Stratford 
was put on record by the Domesday surveyors, 
and it supplies us with many interesting details.^ 
The district had then been for several centuries 
one of the Bishop of Worcester's manors, and 
all the manorial machinery was at work upon it. 
The township growing up there was a village 
community, consisting mainly of very small 
farmers and a few day-labourers with their 
families, and in all their relations of life the 
inhabitants were under the jurisdiction of the 
bishop's steward, or seneschal, in virtual serfdom. 
He presided over the manor court, constituted as 
the court baron, to which the townsmen came 

^ See Domesday Survey (Record Commission). Mr. Seebobm's 
invaluable book on The Village Community in England (1883) 
has defined the conditions of mediaeval agriculture. 

27 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

to supervise the payments of rents and dues, 
the settlement of new-comers, and the distribu- 
tion of land. He, too, kept order in the villages, 
and, with the aid of the community assembled 
in court leet, punished breaches of the peace. 
He saw that the land was properly cultivated, 
that the ploughs were fully yoked, and that the 
seed was fairly sown. 

The actual extent of Stratford in William i.'s 
time was fourteen and a half hides, or nearly 
2000 acres. It was of smaller extent than 
it had been under the Mercian regime, for 
the neighbouring villages had now themselves 
become so many separate manors. The in- 
habitants consisted of a priest, who doubtless 
conducted services in the chapel of the old 
monastery, with twenty-one villeins and seven 
hordariL Each of these residents was the 
head of a family, and their number, therefore, 
represents a population of about one hundred 
and fifty. The villeins stood the higher in the 
social scale. 

On all sides of the village lay arable land, 
divided by balks of earth into narrow strips, 
each about half an acre in size. Each villein 
held, besides his homestead, strips of this land, 

28 



AGRICULTURAL LIFE 

sometimes amounting in the aggregate to sixty 
acres, but the strips in one ownership seldom 
adjoined each other, being scattered over all 
the fields adjoining the village. The hordarii 
from the Saxon hord^ a cottage, were cottagers 
who owned a cottage with a garden, and some 
five acres in strips distributed as in the case of 
the villeins over the fields at hand. But every 
householder, whether villein or cottager, evi- 
dently possessed a plough. The community 
owned altogether thirty-one ploughs, of which 
three belonged to the bishop, the lord of the 
manor, and were probably drawn by a team of 
eight oxen. Both classes of residents were 
liable to small money payments to the lord 
of the manor, and occasionally to payments 
of agricultural produce, besides being called 
upon to labour for several days every year 
on portions of the land cultivated in the 
bishop's own behalf. There was very little 
meadow land. The Domesday surveyors 
only found one field of that character five 
furlongs long and two broad. All the energies 
of the inhabitants were clearly engaged in 
growing wheat, barley, and oats. By the river 
at the same time stood the water-mill belonging 

29 



STRATFOKD-ON-AVON 

to the bishop. There the villagers were obliged 
to grind all their corn, and they had to pay a 
fee for the privilege. In 1085 the mill produced 
an income of ten shillings annually, but the bishop 
was often willing to accept eels in discharge of 
the mill-fee, and a thousand eels were usually 
sent to Worcester year by year by the customers 
of the village mill. It is noticeable that the total 
profit derived from Stratford by Wulf stan was 
twenty-five pounds in the Domesday Survey, an 
amount five times that derived from it in the 
days of Edward the Confessor. The advance 
marks the rapid progress of the settlement in 
the interval. 

In the century and a quarter (from 1085 to 
1210) following, the village does not seem to 
have made any giant's strides. Alveston, 
the obscure little village that now lies in the 
bend of the river nearest to Stratford in its 
upward course, seemed likely then to rival 
it in prosperity. Just before the Norman 
Conquest, 'certain great men,' says Dugdale, 
had withheld Alveston from the Bishops of 
Worcester after it had long been in their pos- 
session, but William the Conqueror restored 
it to Bishop Wulfstan, who generously made 

30 



AGRICULTURAL LIFE 

it over to the great Worcestershire Priory. 
Throughout the Middle Ages that religious 
foundation rivalled the see itself in the posses- 
sion of broad lands. Three mills were erected 
beside the Avon at Alveston, and eels without 
number were sent year by year by its inhabitants 
to the refectory of the priory. The boundaries 
of the Alveston Manor crept up in the thirteenth 
century to their still existing limits on the 
southern side of the bridge of Stratford (it was 
a rude wooden bridge at this early date), and 
the manorial officers planted a little colony by 
their end of the bridge, which was known to 
them and to the Elizabethans as Bridgetown. 
Its dwellers were all of them hordarii or 
cottagers, and in the descriptive rental of the 
Worcestershire Priory compiled about 1250,^ 
the names and annual dues, which varied from 
five shillings to sixteenpence, are given at length. 
One was called Brun, another John de Pont (or, 
as we should say, John Bridge), another William 
Cut. The steward, or seneschal, who looked 
after this, with much surrounding property, 
was a native of Stratford, Nicholas by name, 

1 Cf. the Custumary of the Worcester Priory, published by 
the Camden Society, 

31 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

who held a messuage there with a garden, 
besides arable land in three neighbouring fields. 
For his house and land he had to pay sixpence 
quarterly, to cut hay in the meadow belonging 
to the lord of the manor for one day, and to 
help in stacking it, besides spending three days 
in reaping his lord's grain. 

The various services and payments due 
as rent from the husbandmen of Stratford 
and its neighbourhood at the time — services 
which seemed to increase in intricacy with 
the centuries — are given at length in the book 
of the possessions of the Worcestershire Priory, 
and illustrate the life led by the majority of 
the villagers in the infancy of the town. Of 
the changes in the condition of the inhabitants 
since the Domesday Survey, it need only be 
noted that many of the large estates outside 
the town had been let as knights' fees, that 
is to say, on condition of their holders per- 
forming certain military services, and that 
some of the villeins within the village had 
become free tenants (libere tenentes), that is 
to say, men free from the imputation of serf- 
dom, who were permitted to cultivate their land 
as they would, and paid for their farms a fixed 

32 



AGRICULTURAL LIFE 

money rental, with little or no labour services 
to supplement it. But the majority of the 
inhabitants were still villeins or cottagers, and 
labour services were exacted from both these 
classes with vexatious regularity. Villeins who 
owned sixty acres had to supply two men for 
reaping the lord's fields, and cottagers with 
thirty acres supplied one. On a special day an 
additional reaping service was to be performed 
by villeins and cottagers with all their families 
except their wives and shepherds. Each of the 
free tenants had then also to find a reaper, and 
to direct the reaping himself. Happily on that 
occasion the steward saw that all the labourers 
were fed at the cost of the manor. The villein 
was to provide two carts for the conveyance of 
the corn to the barns, and every cottager who 
owned a horse provided one cart, for the use of 
which he was to receive a good morning meal 
of bread and cheese. One day's hoeing was 
expected of the villein and three days' ploughing, 
and if an additional day were called for, food 
was supplied free to the workers. Villeins and 
cottagers were also expected to assist in cutting 
the hay, in carting and stacking it. When the 
hay had all been gathered in, each householder 
E 33 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

was to be presented with a ram, a fourpenny 
cheese, and a small sum of money instead of 
the fodder to which they were of old allowed to 
help themselves. No villein nor cottager was 
permitted to bring up his child for the Church 
without permission of the lord of the manor. 
A fee had to be paid when a daughter of a 
villein or cottager married. On his death his 
best waggon was claimed by the steward in his 
lord's behalf, and a G.ne of money was exacted 
from his successor — if, the record wisely adds, 
he could pay one. Any townsman who made 
beer for sale paid for the privilege. But 
these charges exhausted the manorial demands. 
Fishing was free, church dues were small, and 
the mills and the barns for storing grain were 
at times placed freely at the disposal of the 
population. 



34 



II 

MEDIEVAL TRADE, MARKETS, AND FAIRS 

But although agricultural pursuits chiefly oc- 
cupied the people of Stratford in the thirteenth 
century, several of them also turned their 
attention to trade, and in an account of the 
settlement rendered to the Bishop of Worcester 
about 1251, we can trace the rise of several 
industries that acquired importance later. 
There were already numerous weavers, tanners, 
and tailors. There were carpenters and dyers, 
whitesmiths and blacksmiths, wheelwrights, 
and fleshmongers, shoemakers and coopers. 
The mill employed a number of labourers as 
millers and fullers.^ 

The Bishops of Worcester were clearly 
anxious to encourage such pursuits. Before 

1 Cf . a survey of Stratford made for the Bishop of Worcester in 
1251, privately printed by Sir Thomas Phillipps at the Middle 
Hill Press. 

35 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

the close of the twelfth century they obtained 
for the town from Richard i. the special privi- 
lege of a weekly market upon the Thursday, a 
privilege for which the citizens paid the bishops 
an annual toll of sixteen shillings. At first the 




ASTON-CANTLOW CHURCH. 



Thursday market was with difficulty maintained, 
and it almost died within a century of its birth. 
But in 1314 it was reinaugurated, an^ became a 
permanent feature of Stratford mediaeval life. 

The pasture -land within and without the 
manorial boundaries must have grown since 
the date of the Domesday Survey, for cattle was 

36 



MEDIAEVAL TRADE 

certainly a staple commodity of the earliest 
Stratford market, From time immeraLorial one 
of the chief thoroughfares in the town has 
been known by its present name of Rother 
Market, and it was doubtless there that the 
first market was held. Rother represents the 
Anglo-Saxon word 'Hreother,' i.e. cattle (from 
the Teutonic 'Hrinthos,' whence the modern 
German rind). The ancient word long survived 
in Warwickshire, and was familiar to Shake- 
speare, who employed it in the line : ' The 
pasture lards the rothers' sides.' ^ It is a more 
significant mark of commercial progress that 
early in the thirteenth century the various dues 
of such inhabitants as were anxious to engage 
in trade were commuted by the lord of the 
manor for a fixed annual sum of twelvepence, 
payable quarterly. The holdings of these 
traders consisted of little more than a house 
and very small gardens, and were known as 
burgages, while their holders were called bur- 
gesses. Such a tenure bore, in the west of 
England, the name of 'the custom of Bristol,' 
a commercial port only second in importance 
at the time to London; and its introduction 

^ Timon of Athens, iv. iii. 12. 

37 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

into Stratford proves the growth of mercantile 
pursuits. .^m 

Meanwhile the national records do not con- 
cern themselves with Stratford very much. 
The Hundred Rolls of Edward i., which were 
drawn up in many counties to form a survey as 
complete as that of the Domesday Book, barely 
deal with Warwickshire; and all they tell us 
concerning Stratford is that the king's justices 
had regulated by standard the manufacture of 
beer in the town, and that the steward of the 
Bishop of Worcester had not enforced the 
regulation. The entry adds that John, a clergy- 
man and bailiff of the Bishop of Worcester, had 
taken ten shillings from a man of Aston- Cant- 
low, doubtless a political offender, who was in 
prison at Stratford, as a bribe to permit him 
to escape. Both these illegal episodes are dated 
after the battle of Evesham. They seem to imply 
some local discontent. Perhaps the people of 
Stratford, or the bishop's steward there, had not 
favoured Henry iii.'s cause in his contest with 
the barons, or it may be that the law had fallen 
into contempt amid the confusion into which 
the Midlands were plunged by the strife which 
closed in favour of the king at Evesham in 1265. 

38 



MEDIEVAL TRADE 

Further commercial privileges were con- 
ferred upon the town at frequent intervals in 
the thirteenth century. Stratford was then 
endowed with a series of annual fairs, the 
chief stimulants of trade in the Middle Ages. 
As early as 1216 a grant was obtained by 
the Bishop of Worcester for the holding of a 
yearly fair, ' beginning on the eve of the Holy 
Trinity' — i.e. on the Saturday following Whit- 
suntide — 'and to continue for the two next 
days ensuing.' Other fairs were added as the 
century progressed. In 1224 a fair was per- 
mitted on the eve of St. Augustine, the 26th of 
May, and ' on the day and morrow after.' In 
1242 and in 1271 a similar distinction was con- 
ferred on both the eve of the Exaltation of 
the Holy Cross — 14th of September — 'the day, 
and two days following,' and 'for the eve of 
the Ascension of our Lord, commonly called 
Holy Thursday, and upon the day and morrow 
after.' The grant of the earliest fair on Trinity 
Sunday was renewed in 1272, and in mediaeval 
times it always proved the busiest of the four 
gatherings, although that of the Holy Cross in 
September has continued longest. Early in the 
following century permission was secured by 

39 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

the townsfolk to hold another fair for the long 
period of fifteen days, to begin yearly on the 
eve of St. Peter and St. Paul, at the latter end 
of June. Out of each of these celebrations the 
Bishop of Worcester made an annual profit 
of about nine shillings and f ourpence. 

The choice of Trinity Sunday for the earliest 
of the Stratford fairs was doubtless due to the 
facts that the parish church was dedicated to 
the Holy Trinity, and that Trinity Sunday being 
* the festival of the church's dedication,' had at 
Stratford, as in other parts of the country, long 
been celebrated by a 'wake,' which brought 
many neighbouring villagers to the town. The 
spiritual side of mediaeval life had a tendency 
to merge itself in the worldly side, and there is 
nothing exceptional in a Sunday of specially 
sacred character being turned to commercial 
uses. In most mediaeval towns, moreover, 
traders exposed their wares at fair-time in the 
churchyard, and chaffering and bargaining were 
conducted in the church itself. The Statute of 
Winchester attempted in vain in 1285 to re- 
strain this extravagance, but it persisted till the 
Reformation. In an early printed ' Comment 
on the Ten Commandments by way of dialogues 

40 



MEDIAEVAL TRADE 

between Dives and Pauper' (1493), the 'pro- 
fane custom' is forcibly condemned. Dives 
asks Pauper, ' What sayest thou of them that 
hold markets and fairs in Holy Church and in 
Sanctuary?' Pauper replies, 'Both the buyer 
and the seller, and men of Holy Church that 
maintain them, or sufPer them when they might 
let [i.e. hinder] it, be accursed. They make 
God's house a den of thieves.' To which Dives 
answers, * And I dread me that full often by 
such fairs God's house is made a tavern of 
gluttons. For the Merchants and Chapmen 
keep there with them their wives and lemans 
both night and day.' The riotous times spent 
at Stratford a century later, when the fairs 
were in process, makes this a very pertinent 
description. 

Thus the close of the thirteenth century 
guaranteed the future prosperity of Stratford. 
The rivalry with Alveston was then practi- 
cally over, and its development was assured. 
The Bishops of Worcester had shown them- 
selves exceptionally vigilant over its interests, 
and it was proving year by year more profitable 
to them. In 1251 the arable land returned to 
them more than £40; in 1299 more than £57. 
F 41 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

The mills had grown in number; there were 
three for grinding corn by the river, and one 
for fulling elsewhere. They yielded at times 
as much as £13, 6s. 8d., an enormous increase 
on their ancient profits. Arable, meadow, and 
pasture all became richer with cultivation. The 
lords of the manor found it convenient to make 
a park in the neighbourhood for hunting pur- 
poses, and therefore paid it frequent visits. 
One bishop anticipating Justice Shallow, and 
not always with more effect, threatened all 
who 'broke his park and stole his deer' with 
excommunication. 



42 



IV 

JOHN, ROBERT, AND RALPH OF STRATFORD 

In the fourteenth century the inhabitants were 
no longer solely dependent for their welfare on 
the benevolence of the lords of the manor. 
Villenage gradually disappeared in the reign 
of Edward iii., and all who were not burgesses 
became free tenants or copyholders, paying 
definite rents for house and land. And from 
these classes sprang men capable of stimu- 
lating the prosperity of their birthplace by 
their own exertions. Three fourteenth-century 
prelates, one of whom rose to be Archbishop 
of Canterbury, and the two others to be 
Bishops respectively of London and Chichester, 
were natives of Stratford, and in days when 
the principle of personal nomenclature was 
still unsettled, borrowed of the town their sur- 
names. John of Stratford, Robert of Strat- 

43 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

ford, and Ralph of Stratford were closely 
related. The two former were brothers, and 
Ralph was their nephew. 

Robert, the father of the prelates Robert and 
John, was a well-to-do inhabitant of Stratford, 
who appears to have set his sons an example in 
local works of benevolence. He it is to whom 
has been attributed the foundation, in 1296, of 
the chapel of the guild — that is, of the religious 
fraternity of which we shall speak hereafter — 
and of the hospital or almshouses attached to it. 
But the benefactions of his sons and his grand- 
son were in many points more remarkable, and 
are better known to authentic history. 

There is little need to pursue their careers 
in detail here; but they gave so practical an 
efPect 'to a more than ordinary afPection' for 
the town, that Stratford must always honour 
their memory. It must always be profitable, 
too, to study their lives as illustrating the rich 
opportunities of advancement in the political 
and ecclesiastical worlds open in the Middle 
Ages to ability, even when revealing itself in 
the sons of village farmers. John and Robert 
were both for a time Chancellors of England, 
and there is no other instance in English 

44 



JOHN, ROBERT, AND RALPH 

history of that high dignity falling to two 
brothers in succession. 

All three were educated at the Universities, 
and successes there proved stepping-stones 
to preferment in Church and State. Ralph 
obtained a canonry at St. Paul's, which led to 
the bishopric of the metropolis. The latter 
office he held from 1340 to 1854, and during his 
episcopate he rented a house in • Bruggestret,' 
or Bridge Street, Stratford.^ 

Robert's first benefice was the living of Strat- 
ford itself, bestowed on him by the Bishop of 
Worcester in 1319, and in that office he was the 
earliest of the three relatives to give tangible 
form to his regard for his birthplace. Long 
streets were in the course of formation at Strat- 
ford in the reign of Edward ii. One ran from 
the Holy Trinity Church towards the north- 
east. Henley Street, whence Henley-in-Arden 
could be most readily reached, had tenements 
on both sides of it; and Greenhill Street, 
afterwards Moor Town's End, had, like Old 
Town, long been inhabited thoroughfares. 
Robert resolved to roughly pave these roads. 
By obtaining permission in 1332 to impose 

^ Corporation Becords, vol. i. p. 1. 

45 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

a toll for four years *on sundry vendible 
commodities,' brought by the agriculturists of 
the neighbourhood into the town, * he defrayed 
the charge thereof,' and the tax was renewed 
for short periods, at his suggestion, in 1335 
and 1337, after he had left the city to exercise 
higher dignities. From the Archdeaconry of 
Canterbury he was promoted in 1337 to the 
see of Chichester. But, like his brother John, 
he aimed at political advancement as well 
as ecclesiastical, and twice filled the office of 
Chancellor of England. He survived both his 
distinguished brother and nephew, dying in 
1362. 

John of Stratford, the most eminent of the 
three, made a name at Oxford by his know- 
ledge of civil law, was Bishop of Winchester 
from 1323 to 1333, and became in the latter 
year Archbishop of Canterbury.^ He played 
a prominent part in the politics of his time. 
As Bishop of Winchester, he drew up the 
Bill of Deposition against Edward ii., and 
Marlowe gives us a glimpse of him in the most 
pathetic scene in his play of Edivard II. He 
undertook more foreign embassies than any of 

1 See Hook's Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury. 

46 



JOHN, ROBERT, AND RALPH 

his contemporaries, and could boast of thirty- 
two journeys made across the Channel in the 
public service. It was John of Stratford who, 
after Edward iii. left England on his first 
French expedition in 1338, virtually governed 
the country as Lord Chancellor. Twice already 
had he filled that dignified office. But the 
king was dissatisfied with the small amount 
of money that his councillors now managed 
to collect for his wars, and suddenly returned 
in 1341 to dismiss all his ministers, charging 
them with dishonesty in their offices. The 
archbishop boldly denied Edward's accusa- 
tion, and bade him remember his father's 
fate, and the rights of the people of England. 
The king had at length to yield to John of 
Stratford, who takes his place in English history 
as a sturdy defender of the constitution 



47 



THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY 

The most notable benefactions which Arch- 
bishop John of Stratford, before his death in 
1348, conferred on Stratford were gathered 
about the parish church. The church, although 
at the time, as the evidence of some of the 
stonework proves, a substantial erection, was 
not fully completed. It had even then many- 
architectural pretensions. The tower still 
retains its Normanesque panel arches, with 
their Early English lights, which pro- 
bably date from the farther side of 1200. 
But John of Stratford desired to make the 
structure more stable and more elaborate. 
Although cruciform in shape, it had but 
an embryo south aisle, and the north 
aisle was very narrow. Having widened the 
north aisle, the archbishop placed there 

48 



CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY 

a chapel to the Holy Virgin, and the Bishops 
of Worcester promoted the decoration of 
the chapel by granting indulgences to those 
who contributed money towards the expenses. 
The south aisle the archbishop built anew, 
and in it he set up a chapel in honour of 
St. Thomas a Becket, with whom he had some 
qualities in common. The church tower he 
renovated, and probably added the wooden 
spire, with which Shakespeare and his con- 
temporaries were acquainted. But his work 
was not wholly confined to mere structural 
improvements. 

In 1332, with the permission of the Bishop of 
Worcester and Edward iii., John of Stratford 
formed a chantry of the chapel of the church, 
dedicated to St. Thomas the Martyr. It is 
difficult for some of us nowadays to appreciate 
the spirit that prompted such a foundation. 
The archbishop's object was to endow B.Ye 
priests to chant for all time at the altar of this 
chapel masses for the souls of the founder and 
his friends. John of Stratford, who had acquired 
much iDroperty about Stratford, appointed for 
the maintenance of the priests of his chantry 
one messuage in Stratford, with the Manor of 
G 49 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

Inge, the modern Ingon-by-Welcombe, and 
among those whose souls his masses were ex- 
pected to free from purgatory were, besides 
himself, his brother Robert, his father and 
mother, the Kings of England, and the Bishops 
of Worcester. Of the five priests, one was 
to be warden of the chapel and another 
sub-warden. John of Stratford, in spite of 
his political cares, watched over the chantry 
with paternal afPection. Year by year he 
added land and houses in Stratford to its 
possessions, and his friends followed his ex- 
ample. One of these was Nicholas of Dudley, 
parson of King's Swynford, in Worcester- 
shire, a connection of a family with a notori- 
ous career before it, who made over much 
property to the chantry about his native village 
of Dudley. And the patronage of the church 
of Stratford, John purchased of the Bishop 
of Worcester and gave to his chantry 
priests, who thus fully controlled the parish 
church. 

Ralph of Stratford was not behind his 
uncles in his generosity to his native town. 
In 1351 he built for John's chantry priests a 
' house of square stone for the habitation of 

50 




THE CHURCH OF 
STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 



CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY 

these priests, adjoining to the churchyard.' 
The ten carpenters and ten masons, with the 
labourers, who doubtless came from London 
to erect the edifice, were placed, while at 
Stratford, under the king's special protection. 
The building came to be known as the College 
of Stratford, and was familiar to the Eliza- 
bethans and their successors, as the map of 
1769 amply proves. In 1415 Henry v. confirmed 
all the privileges of the chantry and the 
college, and the church of Stratford then bore 
the honoured epithet of collegiate, since it was 
under the supervision of a college or chapter 
of priests, in much the same manner as West- 
minster Abbey and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, 
are to this day. 

Other inhabitants of Stratford followed the 
example set by the three prelates of Stratford, 
and made many sacrifices to adorn their church. 
True penitents were urged by the Bishop of 
Worcester in 1321 to contribute to the building 
and the repair of the belfry, and in 1381 to adorn 
and illuminate the altar of the Virgin Mary. 
The warden of the college in the time of 
Edward iv., Dr. Thomas Balsall, 'added a fair 
and beautiful choir, rebuilt from the ground 

53 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

at his own cost,' which still survives. He 
clearly employed master masons of different 
schools. One was faithful to the older models, 
and especially to the Early Decorated style. Of 
his work are the tomb of Balsall, who died in 
1491, the north and south doors, and, doubtless, 
the font at which Shakespeare was baptized. 
The other artificer aimed at greater novelty. 
He studied his bestiary, and perched paunchy 
toads on buttresses, or transferred dragon-flies 
in grotesque attitudes to stone cornices. His 
angels are very whimsical, and if the carvings in 
the stalls be his, he delighted in picturing the 
least refined aspects of humanity. Ralph Col- 
lingwood, the warden at the close of the 
fifteenth century, gave the collegiate church 
its final touches. He renewed the north porch 
and the nave. * The low decorated clerestory 
was removed, the walls pulled down to the 
crowns of the arches, rude angels (by some 'pren- 
tice hand) were inserted to carry the pilasters, 
and the walls were panelled with large lantern 
windows, with a flattish roof.' ^ 

In pursuit of Dr. Balsall's ' pious intent,' 
CoUingwood improved the church service by 
1 Knowles's Architectural Account of Holy Trinity Church. 

54 






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CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY 

appointing ' four children choristers, to be daily 
assistants in the celebration of divine service,' 
and placed them under the supervision of the 
college ; ' which choristers,' according to CoUing- 
wood's ordination, ' should always come by two 
and two together into the choir to Matins and 
Vespers on such days as the same were to 
be sung there, according to the Ordinale 
Sarum ; and at their entrance into the church, 
bowing their knees before the crucifix, each 
of them say a Pater Noster and an Ave. 
And for their better regulation did he order 
and appoint that they should sit quietly in the 
choir, saying the Matins and Vespers of our 
Lady distinctly, and afterwards be observant in 
the offices of the choir : that they should not 
be sent upon any occasion whatsoever into the 
town : that at dinner and supper they should 
constantly be in the college to wait at the 
table : and to read upon the Bible or some 
other authentic book : that they should not 
come into the buttery to draw beer for them- 
selves or anybody else ; that after dinner they 
should go to the singing school : and that their 
schoolmaster should be one of the priests or 
clerks appointed by the discretion of the 

57 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

warden, being a man able to instruct them 
in singing to the organ : as also that they 
should have one bedchamber in the church, 
whereunto they were to repair in winter-time 
at eight of the clock, and in summer at nine : in 
which lodging to be two beds, wherein they were 
to sleep by couples : and that before they did 
put off their clothes they should all say the 
prayer of De profundis with a lond voice, with 
the prayers and orisons of the faithful, and 
afterwards say thus, " God, have mercy on the 
soul of Ralph CoUingwood, our Founder, and 
Master Thomas Balsall, a special benefactor 
to the same.'" For the maintenance of the 
choristers, lands were assigned at Stratford, 
Binton, and Drayton. 

Shakespeare only knew Stratford after the 
Reformation had stripped it of all these ecclesi- 
astical distinctions — distinctions which were 
so many tributes of affection paid to their birth- 
place by his ancient fellow-townsmen — but the 
majority of them had been solidly embodied in 
stone, with which time in his day had not dealt 
unkindly. They were monuments enshrining 
traditions not wholly lifeless, and may well have 
helped a poet to realise the setting of scenes like 

58 






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CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY 

King John's death under the windows of Swin- 
stead Abbey, or Gavmt's last moments in Ely 
House. 




61 



VI 



THE GUILD 



But mediaeval life at Stratford in the later 
Middle Ages developed a new feature, which 
gives it by far its greatest attraction to the 
student of English municipal histery. Self- 
government was in the Middle Ages the aim of 
every English town which deserved the name; 
but so far as our investigations have led us, 
the townsmen of Stratford had made no 
advance in that direction. Before the four- 
teenth century closed, however, an institution 
had arisen and taken formal shape in their 
midst, which was to deprive the Bishops of 
Worcester of their ancient authority. The 
Guild, that then went by the triple name of the 
Holy Cross, the Blessed Virgin, and St. John the 
Baptist, and which still gives its name to the 
picturesque chapel in Church Street, embodied 

62 



THE GUILD 

this emancipating influence. It very possibly 
represents the union of three distinct guilds, 
each bearing one of the names cited ; but we 
have no historical evidence of their combina- 
tion, and for our present purpose it is sufficient 
to regard it as a single institution,^ 

The early English guilds must not be con- 
founded with the modern survival in the city 
of London. The guilds owed their origin to 
popular religious observances, and developed 
into institutions of local self-help. They were 
societies at once religious and friendly, ' col- 
lected for the love of God and our soul's need.' 
Members of both sexes — and the women were 
almost as numerous as the men — were admitted 
on payment of a small annual subscription. 

^ Ample materials for the history of the Stratford Guild are to 
be found in 'Stratford-on-Avon Corporation Records— The Guild 
Accounts,' by Mr. Richard Savage, reprinted from the Stratford- 
on-Avon Herald for 1885. This is a calendar of the extant 
accounts for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which was 
prepared at the expense of Mr. Charles Flower of Stratford. Mr. 
Savage has prepared for publication another collection of guild 
documents preserved at Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford. See 
also Toulmin-Smith's Docicinentary History of English Guilds, 
published by the Early English Text Society, Mr. J. C. Jeaffre- 
son's 'Report on the Stratford University,' published in the 
Eighth Report of the Historical MSS. Commission, and Thomas 
Fisher's extracts from the Guild Records which appeared in the 
Gentleman's Magazine for 1835, 

H 63 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

This primarily secured for them the perform- 
ances of certain religious rites, which were more 
valued than life itself. While the members lived, 
but more especially after their death, lighted 
tapers were duly distributed in their behalf be- 
fore the altars of the Virgin and of their patron 
saints in the parish church. A poor man in the 
Middle Ages found it very difficult, without the 
intervention of the guilds, to keep this road 
to salvation always open. Relief of the poor 
and of necessitous members also formed part of 
the guild's objects, and gifts were frequently 
awarded to members anxious to make pilgrim- 
age to Canterbury, and at times the spinster 
members received dowries from the association. 
The regulation which compelled the members 
to attend the funeral of any of their fellows 
united them among themselves in close bonds 
of intimacy. 

But the social spirit was mainly fostered 
by a great annual meeting. On that occa- 
sion all members were expected to attend in 
special uniform. With banners flying they 
marched in procession to church, and subse- 
quently sat down together to a liberal feast. 
The guilds were strictly lay associations. 

64 



THE GUILD 

Priests in many towns were excluded from 
them, and, where they were admitted, held no 
more prominent places than the laymen. The 
Guilds employed mass priests to celebrate their 
religious services, but they were the paid ser- 
vants of the fraternity. Every member was 
expected to leave at his death as much property 
as he could spare to the guilds, and thus in 
course of time they became wealthy corporations. 
They all were governed by their own elected 
officers — wardens, aldermen, beadles, and clerks, 
— and a common council formed of their repre- 
sentatives kept watch over their property and 
rights. 

Although these religious guilds did not con- 
cern themselves with trade, in many instances 
there grew up under their patronage smaller 
and subsidiary guilds, each formed of members 
engaged in one trade, and aiming at the pro- 
tection of their interests in their crafts. Under 
the name of craft-guilds, these offshoots often, 
as in London, survived the decay of the 
religious association ; their pedigrees became 
obscured and they were credited with greater 
originality and antiquity than they could justly 
claim. Guilds of the religious kind can be traced 

Q5 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

far back in Anglo-Saxon times. King Ine and 

King Alfred mention them in their legal codes. 

But the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw 

their palmiest days. Chaucer includes some of 

their members among his Canterbury pilgrims. 

An Haberdasher and a Carpenter, 
A Webbe, a Deyer, and a Tapiser, 
Were all y-clothed in o livere 
Of a solempne and grete fraternite. 

Wei semed eche of hem a f ayre burgeis, 
To sitten in a gild halle, on the dels. 
Everich, for the wisdom that he can, 
Was shapelich for to ben an alderman. 

At Stratford the guild claimed a very 
ancient history. ' The guild has lasted,' wrote 
its chief officers in 1389, * and its beginning 
was, from time whereunto the memory of man 
reacheth not.' Its muniments now collected 
in the birthplace at Stratford prove that it 
had been in existence early in the thirteenth 
century, and that bequests were then made to 
it. William Sude, who lived in the reign of 
Henry in., is the name of the author of the 
earliest extant deed of gift, and he gave a mes- 
suage of the yearly value of sixpence. Many of 
his contemporaries are known to have followed 
this example, for the sake of their own souls or 

66 



THE GUILD 

those of their fathers and mothers. The 
Bishops of Worcester encouraged such gifts, 
and apparently contrived that some of the guild's 
revenues should be devoted to the relief of 
poor priests ordained by them without any sure 
title. Godfrey Giffard, on 7th October 1270, 
issued letters of indulgence for forty days to 
all sincere penitents who had duly confessed 
their sins, and had conferred benefits on the 
Guild of the Holy Cross of Stratford-on-Avon. 
Before Edward i.'s reign closed the guild was 
wealthy in houses and lands. In 1353, from 
which year the extant account-books date, there 
was scarcely a street in Stratford without a house 
belonging to the association. 

It was in Edward i.'s time that the elder 
Robert of Stratford laid for the guild the 
foundation of a special chapel, and of neigh- 
bouring almhouses. These buildings, with the 
hall of meeting, called the Rode or Rood Hall 
(rood being equivalent to cross), were doubtless 
situated in Church Street, where the guildhall 
and guild buildings subsequently stood, as they 
stand at this day. The fourteenth century 
witnessed a rapid growth of the guild's pro- 
sperity. In 1332 Edward iii. gave the corpora- 

67 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

ti on a charter which confirmed its rights to all 
its possessions, and to the full control of its own 
affairs. In 1389 Richard ii. sent commissioners 
to report upon the ordinances of the guilds 
throughout England, and the return for Strat- 
ford is still extant, though the historians of the 
town have persistently overlooked it. The 
details are so picturesque that I make no apology 
for quoting them in full. 



These are the ordinances (the document begins) of 
the brethren and sisters of the Guild of the Holy 
Cross of Stratford. 

First : Each of the brethren who wishes to remain 
in the guild, shall give f ourpence a year, payable four 
times in the year ; namely, a penny on the feast of 
St. Michael, a penny on the feast of St. Hilary, a 
penny at Easter, and a penny on the feast of St. John 
Baptist. Out of which payments there shall be made 
and kept up one wax candle, which shall be done in 
worshipful honour of our Lord Jesus Christ and of 
the blessed Virgin and of the Holy Cross. And the 
wax candle shall be kept alight every day thro ughout 
the year, at every mass in the church, before the 
blessed Cross; so that God and the blessed Virgin, 
and the venerated Cross, may keep and guard all the 
brethren and sisters of the guild from every ill. And 
whoever of the brethren or sisters neglects to co me 

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THE GUILD 

at the above-named times [when the payments are 
due], shall pay one penny. 

It is also ordained by the brethren and sisters 
of the guild, that, when any of them dies, the wax 
candle before-named, together with eight smaller 
onesj shall be carried from the church to the house 
of him that is dead ; and there they shall be kept 
alight before the body of the dead until it is carried 
to the church ; and the wax candles shall be carried 
and kept alight until the body is buried, and after- 
wards shall be set before the Cross. Also, all the 
brethren of the guild are bound to follow the body 
to church, and to pray for his soul until the body is 
lA bnried. And whoever does not fulfil this, shall pay 
one halfpenny. 

It is also ordained by the brethren and sisters, that 
if any poor man in the town dies, or if any stranger 
has not means of his own out of which to pay for a 
light to be kept burning before his body, the brethren 
and sisters shall, for their souls' health, whosoever 
he may be, find four wax candles, and one sheet, and 
a hearsecloth to lay over the coffin until the body is 
buried. 

It is further ordained by the brethren and sisters, 
that each of them shall give twopence a year, at a 
meeting which shall be held once a year ; namely, at 
a feast which shall be held in Easter week, in such 
manner that brotherly love shall be cherished among 
them, and evil-speaking be driven out ; that peace 
shall always dwell among them, and true love be 

71 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

upheld. And every sister of the guild shall bring 
with her to this feast a great tankard ; and all the 
tankards shall be filled with ale ; and afterwards the 
ale shall be given to the poor. So likewise shall the 
brethren do ; and their tankards shall in like manner 
be filled with ale, and this also shall be given to the 
poor. But, before that ale shall be given to the poor, 
and before any brother or sister shall touch the feast 
in the hall where it is accustomed to be held, all the 
brethren and sisters there gathered together shall put 
up their prayers, that God and the blessed Virgin 
and the venerated Cross, in whose honour they have 
come together, will keep them from all ills and sins. 
And if any sister does not bring her tankard, as is 
above said, she shall pay a halfpenny. Also, if any 
brother or sister shall, after the bell has sounded, 
quarrel, or stir up a quarrel, he shall pay a halfpenny. 

It is also ordained, that no one shall remain in this 
guild unless he is a man of good behaviour. 

It is moreover ordained, that when one of the 
brethren dies, the officers shall summon a third part 
of the brethren, who shall watch near the body, and 
pray for his soul, through the night. Whoever, 
having been summoned, neglects to do this, shall 
pay a halfpenny. 

It is ordained by the Common Council of the whole 
guild, that two of the brethren shall be Aldermen ; 
and six other brethren shall be chosen, who shall 
manage all the affairs of the guild with the Alder- 
men; and whoever of them is absent on any day 

72 



THE GUILD 

agreed among themselves for a meeting, shall pay 
fourpence. 

If any brother or sister brings with him a guest, 
without leave of the steward, he shall pay a half- 
penny. Also, if any stranger, or servant, or youth, 
comes in, without the knowledge of the officers, he 
shall pay a halfpenny. Also, if any brother or sister 
is bold enough to take the seat of another, he shall 
pay a halfpenny. 

Also, if it happens that any brother or sister has 
been robbed, or has fallen into poverty, then, so 
long as he bears himself well and rightly toAvards 
the brethren and sisters of the guild, they shall find 
him in food and clothing and what else he needs. 

These ordinances, providing for kindly gifts 
of beer to the poor, for the preservation of good 
fellowship among all the members and for their 
participation in each others' joys and griefs, 
vividly put before us the simple piety and 
charity of the Stratford tov^nspeople. The 
regulations for the government of the guild 
by two wardens or aldermen and six others 
prove the progress of the town in the direction 
of self-government. It is not difficult to per- 
ceive how an association, which grew to include 
all the substantial householders of the district, 
necessarily acquired much civil jurisdiction; 
I 73 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

how its members referred to its council their 
disputes with one another; how the aldermen 
were gradually regarded as the administrators 
of the municipal police; or how the burgesses 
preferred this new regime to servile dependence 
on the steward of the lord of the manor. The 
college priests were very jealous of the guild's 
growing influence, and when the guild resisted 
the payment of tithes brought a lawsuit against 
it to compel their payment. But this seemed to 
be the fraternity's only external obligation. 

The ledgers or account-books of the guild, 
still extant for the fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries, well repay close study. Their micro- 
scopic details enable the historian to trace the 
progress of the society in all its aspects from 
year to year and almost from month to month. 

The receipts under the various headings of 
'light-money,' rents, and fines, increase with 
satisfactory regularity, and the expenses grow 
correspondingly. Candles both of tallow and 
wax, repairs of house property, the setting up of 
hedges, form large items of expenditure, but in 
each year's balance-sheet the details of the food 
and drink provided for the annual feast occupy 
more and more extravagant space. The small 

74 



THE GUILD 

pigs and large pigs ; the pullets, geese, veal, and 
' carcases ' of mutton ; the eggs, butter, and 
honey; the almonds, raisins, currants, garlic, 
salt, pepper, and other spices were gathered in 
from all the neighbouring villages in appalling 
quantities. Gallons of wine and bushels of malt 
for brewing ale were likewise provided in gener- 
ous measure. Horsemen were often equipped at 
the guild's expense to bring in the supplies. After 
the feast was done there came the settlement for 
such items as washing the napery, rushes for the 
floor of the dining hall, coal and charcoal for the 
kitchen, the cooks' and other servants' wages. 
At times the feast was enlivened by professional 
minstrelsy. Twenty pence was paid to minstrels 
from Warwick in 1424 and a single performer 
was often engaged at a fee of fivepence. 

The guild buildings, the chief room of which 
was the guildhall, were enlarged and embel- 
lished after 1400. A parlour was added in 1427 ; 
it was paved with tiles, and the window was 
of glass. A chimney was provided for the 
counting-house at the same time and a school- 
house was built. The building material all came 
from neighbouring places — tiles from Warwick, 
stone from Drayton or Grafton, plaster from 

77 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

Welcomb. Additions were also made to the 
almshouses set up near at hand for the guild's 
pensioners, and towards the close of the fifteenth 
century the chapel was carefully repaired. Mean- 
while the number of the members steadily 
increased. One curious feature of the later 
conditions of membership was that the souls of 
the dead could be made free of the fraternity 
on payment from the living as easily as the 
living themselves. Thus, early in the fifteenth 
century six persons surnamed Whittington, the 
dead children of John Whittington, of Stratford, 
were all admitted to a share in the guild's spirit- 
ual benefit for the sum of ten shillings. Before 
the Middle Ages closed, the fame of the guild 
had grown wide enough to attract to its ranks 
noblemen like George, Duke of Clarence, 
Edward iv.'s brother, and his wife, with Ed- 
ward, Lord Warwick, and Margaret, two of 
their children ; and so distinguished a judge as 
Sir Thomas Littleton was one of the members. 
Merchants of towns as far distant as Bristol 
and Peterborough joined it, and few towns or 
villages of Warwickshire were unrepresented on 
its roll of members. All the neighbouring clergy 
were prominent members. 

78 



THE GUILD 

The fee for admission at its flourishing 
epochs varied from six shillings and eightpence 
to four pounds, according to the wealth of the 
candidates. Those artificers and traders unable 
to pay the entrance fee in money were allowed 
to defray it in work. Thus, in 1408 Simon 
Gove, carpenter, was admitted on his under- 
taking to build a porch at the door of the guild, 
and in 1409 John Iremonger was admitted on 
covenanting to build a house on the guild 
ground, at the end of Henley Street. Five 
years later John Ovyrton, a cook, of Warwick, 
and his wife, were received into the fraternity 
on condition of cooking the annual dinner, 
for which they were to receive the hood of the 
guild — the chief part of its distinctive uniform — 
and their expenses. In 1427 several weavers 
were made free of the guild on condition of 
supplying cloth for the members' hoods and a 
banner with paintings on it. In other years, 
building material — tiles, plaster of Paris, stone 
— was taken instead of the fees. Gifts in kind 
from the prosperous members were frequent. 
Silver cups, silver spoons, ecclesiastical vest- 
ments, missals, statues of saints, and wax for 
candles were often presented by novices. Con- 

79 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

tributions to the annual feasts, of corn, malt, 
salt, red or white wine, were always welcomed. 
In 1416 the guild received from five members 
*a great pot for frumetty, a broad dish of 
mascolyn, one basin, one board -cloth, and 
one towel ' ; and in 1426 eight couples of 
rabbits, two ewes with lamb, and a boar. In 
1421 the presents included a silver chalice 
and a coat of armour, and in 1474 seven 
pewter dishes and ten pewter saucers. A 
schedule of 'the diverse goodes and juellies 
beynge in the Gildehalle ' in 1434 is remark- 
able for the number and richness of its 
contents. Nor was there any falling off 
in the bequests of houses and lands. The 
guild acquired in 1481 the rectory and chapelry 
of Little Wilmcote, where the Ardens — the 
ancestors of Shakespeare's mother — had pro- 
perty with all its tithes and profits. In 1419 
a tenement in Church Street, and in 1478 a 
shop in the Middle Row, came into its posses- 
sion, and later nearly all High Street and 
Chapel Lane — then called Dead Lane or Walker 
Street — owned the guild as landlord. 

The inner constitution did not undergo 
much alteration until late in the fifteenth 

80 



THE GUILD 

century. New ordinances were promulgated 
in 1444; and while they define with more 
precision than the former ones the duties of 
the guild's officers, and the mode of election 
to them, they differ from their predecessors 
mainly in the increased importance attached to 
the priests or chaplains, now five in number, 
employed by the guild, and perhaps prove that 
its ancient independence of ecclesiasticism was 
in jeopardy. The chaplains were to perform 
five daily masses hour by hour, from six o'clock 
to ten in the morning. They were to live 
together in one house, under as strict a disci- 
pline concerning hours for sleep and meals as 
the choristers in the college by the churchyard. 
They had to walk in procession with the 
guild in their copes and surplices, with crosses 
and banners, on the four principal feasts of 
the year, and to officiate with the priests of 
the college at the funeral of every member 
and of the pensioners in the almshouses. 
They were to avoid the county wakes, and 
not to say mass out of Stratford without the 
guild's permission. The guild had now its 
master, aldermen, and proctors elected yearly. 
Every new member was to be admitted in 

81 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

the presence of the master, the clerk, and at 
least two aldermen. No member could be 
chosen alderman unless he had first served the 
office of proctor. The proctors were, on the 
Monday following the Nativity of St. John the 
Baptist (24th June), to receive and account for 
the silver money received for providing candles, 
and all the rents of the guild. They were 
to make an annual inventory of the property. 
Their duties also included the repair of all 
the tenements of the Corporation, and the 
arrangements for the feasts and dinners, of 
the dates of which they were duly to in- 
form the members. There were more dinners 
than of old. Private entertainments were 
given to neighbouring landlords. In 1463 
the Bishop of Worcester was the guest of 
the guild, with Sir John Greville and other 
persons of distinction. The master and alder- 
men met in council every quarter-day at least, 
and absentees without excuse were fined forty 
pence. The master saw to the purchase of 
cloth for the members' hoods. The oath 
taken on admission was to the effect that 
the brother or sister would truly pay his 
fine ; that he would seek in all things the profit 

82 



THE GUILD 

of the fraternity ; that he would refer all his 
disputes with fellow-members to the master; 
and that he would sue none of his brethren 
without leave of the master and aldermen, upon 
pain of a fine of twenty shillings. The date of 
the annual feast was altered to the 6th July, 
the octave of St. Peter and St. Paul. Several 
regulations were issued later to prevent the 
* great inconvenience and hurt that grow to 
this guild by private affection and grant of 
the master and part of his brethren,' by which 
land and houses were let at low rents to 
favoured friends. 

By far the most important of the new 
objects of the guild in the fifteenth century 
was the organisation of the grammar school 
for the children of the members. We have 
seen that the schoolhouse was built in 1427. 
Thomas Jollyffe is the name of the member 
always associated with its foundation, but it 
is now proved to have been in existence 
before the date (1453) usually assigned to its 
origin. Attendance was free, and the school- 
master was forbidden to take anything from 
his pupils. The master of the guild paid 
him an annual salary of ten pounds. It was 
K 83 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

at the guild school, somewhat altered in 
shape, that Shakespeare was afterwards edu- 
cated. 

When the fifteenth century closed the days 
of the guild's prosperity were numbered. It 
had grown inconveniently wealthy, and its 
wealth was administered by a narrow oligarchy. 
Men and women of position in all parts of the 
country had sought and obtained admission to 
it, but the extension of the guild's boundaries 
was not favourable to the simple fraternal senti- 
ment, and the duties of membership acquired a 
chilling formality. Religious feeling was de- 
clining and the steady growth of the priests' 
influence in the guild's internal economy failed 
to attract new members. The fee charged for 
admission fell gradually from twenty-five shil- 
lings to twenty-five pence, and yet candidates 
decreased. To the commercial progress of the 
country the decline may be in part attributed. 
Subsidiary guilds or companies, formed of men 
engaged in the same or cognate trades, had risen 
up among the members of the old Stratford 
guild, and had separated the great fraternity 
into small cliques. At first the parent guild 
appears to have encouraged the formation of 

84 



THE GUILD 

these traders' unions. We know that one room 
of the guild buildings, where ' John Smyth, alias 
Colyere, first made a clock, having the hand 
towards the street and figures all gilded,' was 
known as the Drapers' Chamber as early as 
1419, and was probably so called because the 
Stratford drapers were permitted to assemble 
there to regulate their business arrangements. 
Other trades soon secured the same privilege, 
and in the sixteenth century every commercial 
pursuit had its company at Stratford. When 
the old religious guild was dissolved, these trade- 
societies or craft -guilds lived on and shared 
some of its traditions and repute. 



85 



YII 

SIR HUGH CLOPTON'S BENEFACTIONS 

At the close of the Middle Ages, the town 
of Stratford -on -Avon looked back on some 
seven or eight centuries of continuous progress. 
Originally the offshoot of a monastery, it had 
almost reached the dignity of an independent 
township. Bishops had nurtured it in its 
infancy and the discipline of religion had left 
its mark on the town. The majestic church 
with its college of priests testified to the pious 
benefactions of many generations of towns- 
men. Religion, too, had developed among all 
the inhabitants — men and women — a fraternal 
sentiment powerful enough to call into being 
the guild, which, with its hall, chapel, school, 
almshouses, was barely less notable from the 
architectural point of view than the collegiate 
church. If the Stratford community, less 

86 



HUGH CLOPTON'S BENEFACTIONS 

fortunate than their Coventry neighbours, had 
failed to develop a special industry, all the 
simple crafts were practised in the town, and 
were well organised among themselves. Strat- 
ford undoubtedly felt some of the effects of the 
transition from the mediaeval to the modern era. 
The guild — the centre of the town's mediaeval 
life — temporarily suffered collapse, but it was 
quickly restored to a new and healthier career 
as the governing body of the town, and its new 
birth secured for Stratford municipal indepen- 
dence. Of outward change Stratford between 
the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries knew 
little. Not only the chief public buildings, 
but many of the dwelling houses with which 
Shakespeare was familiar, dated from the 
mediaeval period, and survived far beyond 
Shakespeare's day. Very early in the sixteenth 
century some additional adornments were made 
by private benefactors. But when these were 
completed, Stratford was at all points the 
Stratford that Shakespeare and his children 
knew.^ 
From the neighbouring village of Clopton 

1 For the early part of the sixteenth century, Jeaffreson's 
Report, Toulmin-Smith's Account of the Guilds, and Dugdale 
are the chief authorities. 

87 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

came to Stratford, about 1480, Sir Hugh Clop- 
ton, the last of its early benefactors, and to him 
the town owed the latest structural improve- 
ments. His biography offers many points of in- 
terest. He energetically devoted great abilities 
to commerce and to commercial speculations, 
and is noted as an early example of the self- 
made merchant. His pedigree is traced back 
to Robert of Clopton, a substantial yeoman, 
who in 1228 obtained from Peter de Montfort, 
apparently a relative of the great Simon, the 
Manor of Clopton, about a mile to the north- 
east of Stratford. Of the ninth generation in 
descent, Hugh was a younger son. His elder 
brother, Thomas, who inherited the family 
estates and the great Clopton Manor House, 
was religiously inclined, and built, in the first 
instance, an oratory in his manor house, and 
afterwards a 'fair chapel,' in which he obtained 
Pope Sixtus iv.'s permission to celebrate divine 
service. 

Hugh turned his attention at an early age 
to trade, and made his fortune as a mercer in 
London. He was Lord Mayor in 1492, never 
married, and devoted his leisure and his wealth 
to philanthropy. Stratford was his country 

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HUGH CLOPTON'S BENEFACTIONS 

home. There he erected, about 1483, 'a pretty- 
house of brick and timber, wherein he lived 
in his latter days,' and obtained lands in other 
parts of the town, and in Wilmcote and 
Bridgetown. His ' pretty house,' the chief 
building in the town, was, within the first 
quarter of the sixteenth century, known as New 
Place, and became Shakespeare's property in 
1597. It stood in Chapel Street, at the corner 
of Chapel Lane, and at the opposite corner of 
the lane was the chapel of the guild. Clopton 
hoped to end his days there, and in his will 
stated his desire to be buried 'in the parish 
church of Stratford within the chapel of our 
lady, between the altar there and the chapel of 
the Trinity. But the fates were against the 
fulfilment of his hopes, and, dying in London in 
1496, he finally 'bequeathed' his body to the 
chapel of St. Katherine, in the parish church of 
St. Margaret, Lothbury. 

New Place was far from being Clopton's sole 
contribution to Stratford. The chapel standing 
over against his house, and belonging to the 
guild, of which he was a prominent member, 
needed restoration in the last days of the 
fifteenth century, and he readily defrayed the 

91 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

expenses of the work. He did not touch the 
chancel, which was renovated about 1450, but 
the nave he determined to rebuild. Death 
overtook him before the structure was finished, 
but by his will he provided for its com- 
pletion. *And whereas,' he wrote, 'of late I 
have bargained with one Dowland and divers 
other masons for the building and setting up 
of the Chapel of the Holy Trinity, within the 
town of Stratford-on-Avon aforesaid, and the 
tower of a steeple to the same, I will that the 
said masons sufficiently and ably do and finish 
the same with good and true workmanship, and 
they truly perform the same, making the said 
works as well of length, and breadth, and 
height, such as by the advice of mine executors, 
and other divers of the substantialest and 
honest men of the same parish, shall and can 
be thought most convenient and necessary; 
and all the aforesaid works to be done by mine 
executors, and paid upon my proper goods and 
charges ; and in like wise the covering and 
roofing of the same chapel with glazing, and all 
other furnishments thereunto necessary to it, 
to be paid by my said executors as the works 
aforesaid goeth forth.' The ' furnishments ' 

92 




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HUGH CLOPTON'S BENEFACTIONS 

included elaborate paintings on the roof, illus- 
trating the history of the Holy Cross. Although 
in mediaeval times that history was usually 
traced back to the creation of the world, 
Clopton's artists connected it with no more 
ancient personages than King Solomon and the 
Queen of Sheba, and thence brought it by 
several stages to the time of St. Helena, the 
mother of Constantine, who made a successful 
pilgrimage to Palestine to discover its where- 
abouts in the fourth century. Other paintings 
commemorated St. Thomas a Becket, St. 
George and the Dragon, and the Last Judg- 
ment. In 1804 the paintings were discovered 
beneath a covering of whitewash, and they 
were copied and engraved, but they have since 
been more than once recoated with whitewash, 
and are probably wholly destroyed.^ 

Another of Sir Hugh Clopton's benefactions 
was of greater practical utility. The towns- 
people had long felt the need of a good bridge 
over the river, and * the great and sumptuous 
bridge upon the x^von, at the east end of the 

1 Cf. Thomas Fisher's Series of Ancient Allegorical . . . Paint- 
ings . . . discovered . . . at Stratford-on-Avon, London, 1807 
fol. 

L 93 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

town,' constructed of freestone, with fourteen 
arches, and * a long causeway ' of stone, ' well 
walled on each side at the west,' was erected 
by Sir Hugh. Leland, the antiquary, who 
visited Stratford about 1530 on a tour through 
England, noted in his account of his journey 
the great value of this gift. 'Afore the time 
of Hugh Clopton,' he wrote, ' there was but a 
poor bridge of timber, and no causeway to come 
to it, whereby many poor folks either refused 
to come to Stratford when the river was up, or 
coming thither stood in jeopardy of life.' The 
bridge required frequent repair, as we shall see, 
in Shakespeare's day, but enough of it is still 
standing to convince us of the workmanlike 
thoroughness with which its foundations were 
laid. 

By Sir Hugh Clopton's will Stratford largely 
benefited in other ways. ' He bequeathed also 
C marks to be given to xx poor maidens of 
good name and fame dwelling in Stratford, Le, 
to each of them five marks apiece at their 
marriage ; and likewise CZ. to the poor house- 
holders in Stratford ; as also LZ^. to the new 
building the cross aisle in the Parish Church 
there ' (Dugdale). The testator did not, at the 

94 



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HUGH CLOPTON'S BENEFACTIONS 

same time, forget the needs of the poor of 
London, or their hospitals; and on behalf of 
poor scholars at the Universities, he established 
six exhibitions at Cambridge and Oxford, 
each of the annual value of four pounds for 
five years. 




STAIRCASE OF CLOPTON HOUSE. 



97 



VIII 

THE REFORMATION AT STRATFORD 

Although the town was thus structurally com- 
pleted, its internal government had not advanced 
with the times. The steward of the Bishop of 
Worcester, the lord of the manor, was still in 
name the supreme authority. The Reformation 
gave the needful impulse and exerted a deter- 
mining influence on the constitutional develop- 
ment of Stratford. Before the Reformation had 
run its full course, it brought to fruition the 
townspeople's desire for self-government. 

The new movement respected none of the old 
rights of ecclesiastics to property, and the claims 
of the Bishops of Worcester to manorial rights 
in Stratford were summarily set aside. About 
1550 John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, one of 
Edward vi.'s Lord Protectors, and afterwards 
Duke of Northumberland, was installed in the 
bishop's place as Lord of the Manor of Stratford, 

98 



THE REFORMATION 

and the king added to his estate the Lordship, 
Manor, and Castle of Kenilworth, which was not 
very far distant. When the Duke of Northum- 
berland's ambitious plot to set his daughter-in- 
law Lady Jane Grey on the throne of England 
came to nought, and he paid the penalty of failure 
on the scaffold. Queen Mary humanely made 
Stratford over for a short while to his widowed 
duchess ; but she finally assigned it to the 
Savoy Hospital beyond Temple Bar, which she 
had revived for the poor of London. Such 
changes in the ownership of the manor did not, 
however, very nearly affect the townsmen ; for 
the manorial property had been diminished by 
gifts of the Bishops of Worcester to the guild, and 
the powers of the manorial lord had been lessened 
by the assumption of many of his ancient func- 
tions by the fraternity's wardens and aldermen. 
More important to the townsmen were the 
laws of Henry viii.'s reign, dealing with 
religious houses and corporations. The Acts 
for their dissolution immediately affected more 
than one institution at Stratford. The college 
— the home of the chantry priests — was the 
first to fall. In 1535 commissioners visited it, 
and found the warden, the five priests, and the 

99 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

four choristers living there sumptuously. Sub- 
sidiary chapels had been set up by the college 
in the neighbouring villages of Bishopston and 
Luddington, of which they owned the tithes. 
Its lands were under the supervision of a 
steward and a bailiff. The annual income was 
£128, 9s. Id. In 1545 another report was 
made, and it was noted that all its officers had, 
besides a good yearly stipend, two shillings 
weekly for their diet allowed out of the posses- 
sions of the institution. It was rich in silver 
and gold, and Henry viii. appropriated 
before the close of his reign no less than 260 
ounces of its plate. The priests were appar- 
ently permitted to reside within the college till 
1547, but in that year all college chantries and 
free chapels were finally suppressed. For four 
years the Stratford College seems to have been 
uninhabited. In 1551 it was made over as a 
royal gift to the Earl of Warwick, the new lord 
of the manor. He transformed it into a private 
residence ; but his execution in 1553 brought 
the building again into the hands of the 
Crown. Elizabeth leased it in 1576 to a Richard 
Coningsby, and he it was who sublet it to 
wealthy John Combe, who lived there on good 

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THE REFORMATION 

terms with Shakespeare, although he bore the 
reputation of being a ' develish usurer.' 

The guild underwent a far more striking 
transformation. The politicians who sur- 
rounded Henry viii. and Edward vi. found 
the destruction of religious corporations not 
more satisfactory to their consciences than to 
their purses. In 1545 and in 1547 com- 
missioners came to Stratford to report upon 
the possessions and constitution of the Guild 
of the Holy Cross. The income was estimated 
at £50, Is. ll|^d., of which £21, 6s. 8d. was paid as 
salary to four chaplains. There was a clerk, who 
received 4s. a year ; and Oliver Baker, who saw 
to the clock (outside the chapel), received 13s. 4d. 
* Upon the premises was a free school, and Wil- 
liam Dalam, the schoolmaster, had yearly for 
teaching £10.' * There is also given yearly,' 
the report runs, ' to xxiiij poor men, brethren 
of the said guild, Ixiijs iiijc?. ; vz. xs. to be 
bestowed in coals, and the rest given in ready 
money; besides one house there called the 
Almshouse ; and besides v. or vjZ^. given 
them of the good provision of the master of 
the same guild.' In the report of 1547 the 
importance of the guild chapel to the town is 

101 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

strongly insisted upon. It was more centrally 
situated than the parish church, since the town 
had long left the banks of the river, and the 
old and sick regularly attended service there. 
The chapel stood in the midst of the town, ' for 
the great quietness and comfort of all the 
parishioners there; for that the parish church 
standeth out of the same town, distant from the 
most part of the said parish half a mile and 
more; and in time of sickness, as the plague 
and such like diseases doth chance within the 
said town, then all such infective persons, with 
many other impotent and poor people, doth to 
the said chapel resort for their daily service.' 

But in 1547 all these advantages ceased: the 
guild was dissolved, and all the property came 
into the royal treasury. It was, as we have seen, 
in the same year that the lordship of the manor 
was transferred from the Bishops of Worcester to 
the Protector Northumberland, who was far too 
occupied with affairs of state to renew the worn- 
out machinery of manorial government. And 
now too all the functions of local government 
which the guild had tacitly exercised were para- 
lysed. For six years the town lacked any 
responsible government. 

102 



IX 

THE GROWTH OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 

But the inconvenience of anarchy, barely tem- 
pered by the occasional appearance of the 
steward of the manor, was felt to be an un- 
bearable humiliation. About 1550 the leading 
townsmen — the old officers of the guild — laid 
their grievance before the king, and begged 
him to rehabilitate the guild as a municipal 
corporation. The application was successful, 
and Edward vi.'s reply, dated 7th June 1553, 
unreservedly placed the government of the 
borough in the hands of its own inhabi- 
tants. 

Whereas (the charter ran) the borough of Sti'atf ord- 
upon-Avon, in the county of WarAvick, is an ancient 
borough, in which borough a certain guild was in 

M 103 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

time founded and endowed with divers lands, tene- 
ments, and possessions, from whose rents, revenues, 
and profits a certain Grammar School was main- 
tained and supported for the education and instruc- 
tion of boys and youths, and a certain charitable 
house was there maintained and supported for the 
sustenance of twenty-four poor persons, and a cer- 
tain great stone bridge called Stratford Bridge, 
placed and built over the water and river of the 
Avon beside the said borough, was from time to 
time maintained and repaired. And the lands, tene- 
ments, and possessions of the same guild have come 
into our hands and now remain in our hands. And 
Avhereas the inhabitants of the borough of Stratford 
aforesaid from time beyond the memory of man 
have had and enjoyed divers franchises, liberties, 
and free customs, jurisdictions, privileges, rever- 
sions, and quittances by reason and pretext of 
charters, concessions, and confirmations made in 
ancient time by our progenitors to the masters and 
brethren of the aforesaid guild and otherwise, which 
the same inhabitants of the same borough aforesaid 
are now very little able to have and enjoy, because 
the aforesaid guild is dissolved, and in consideration 
of other causes now apparent to us whence it ap- 
pears likely that the borough aforesaid and the 
government thereof may go to a worse state from 
time to time, if a remedy be not quickly provided. 
On which grounds the inhabitants of the borough of 
Stratford aforesaid have humbly prayed us that we 

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GROWTH OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 

would accord them our favour and abundant grace, 
for the amelioration of the said borough and the 
government thereof, and for the support of the 
great works which they from time to time are com- 
pelled and ought to sustain and support, and that 
we would deign to make, reduce, and create them 
the same inhabitants into a body corporate and 
politic. 

And directions followed ordering this ' re- 
duction ' and ' creation ' to proceed without 
delay. 

Thus the ancient guild did not lie long in 
cold obstruction ; in 1554 it entered on a new 
tenure of life. The names and functions of its 
chief officers were slightly changed, but the 
bailiff, chosen on the Wednesday next before 
the Nativity of our Lady (8th September), was 
merely the old warden newly spelt. The alder- 
men bore the same titles as of old. The 
proctors were replaced by the chamberlains. 
The clerk's and beadle's offices remained un- 
changed. The common council continued to 
meet monthly in the guildhall or one of the 
adjoining chambers 'at nine o'clock of the 
forenoon,' summoned by the bell of the guild 
chapel ; but the assembly now included, besides 

107 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

the bailiff and ten aldermen, the ten chief or 
capital burgesses, and its edicts governed the 
whole town. Regular performance of duty was 
secured by fines of six-and-eightpence on all 
absentees from meetings of the council, and of 
ten pounds on any councillor declining to 
assume the office of bailiff when elected to it. 
Very heavy penalties (five pounds for a first 
offence, ten for a second, and ' to be expulsed ' 
for ever for a third) punished those who dis- 
cussed 'forth of the council chamber' any of 
its proceedings. 'In all and every general 
procession,' every councillor, according to 
'orders passed' in 1557, was to take part 'in 
his honest apparel as in his gown' — a survival 
of the hood of the guild — on pain of a twelve- 
penny fine, and a like forfeiture awaited any one 
who attended a ' hall ' without ' his gown upon 
his back.' The characteristic fraternal senti- 
ment of the original institution was perpetuated 
in the orders 'that none of the aldermen nor 
none of the capital burgesses, neither in the 
council chamber nor elsewhere, do revile one 
another, but brotherlike live together, and that 
after they be entered into the council chamber, 
that they nor none of them depart not forth but 

108 



GROWTH OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 

in brotherly love, under the pains of every 
offender to forfeit and pay for every default, 
vjs. viijf?.' Similarly, when any councillor or 
his wife died, all were to attend the funeral *in 
their honest apparel, and bring the corpse to 
the church, there to continue and abide devoutly 
until the corpse be buried.' 

The estates of the guild, to which the greater 
part of the college lands were added, became 
the corporate property, and the chattels of the 
guild — the vestments, armour, and plate — 
passed into the hands of the new body. The 
school, in which Edward vi. showed a special 
interest, became, with the chapel and alms- 
houses, institutions of the borough. The vicar 
of the parish church was a corporate officer, 
with a salary of twenty pounds annually and 
two pounds in tithes. Nearly all functions that 
the steward of the lord of the manor had per- 
formed were absorbed in the new regime, and 
for their due exercise a few new legal and police 
offices were created. The bailiff was a duly- 
appointed magistrate. He attended the judges 
at the assizes, and presided, with his sergeants 
and constables, in a monthly court of record, for 
the recovery of small debts, and at the great law- 

109 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

days or leets, to which all the inhabitants were 
summoned to revise and enforce the police regu- 
lations. The leets were held twice a year— on 
the Wednesdays after the feast of St. Michael 
the Archangel (29th September) and after Low 
Sunday, i.e. the week after Easter. Shakespeare 
was familiar with these observances. Kit Sly, 
talking in his sleep, promises to present the ale- 
wife of Wincot at the leet, ' because she brought 
stone jugs and no seal'd quarts,' and lago 
speaks in metaphor of keeping 'leets and law- 
days.' The new corporation also assumed the 
duty of supervising the trade of the town. 
Under the shadow of the religious fraternity, we 
have watched the trading companies come into 
being, and the town council now kept them 
strictly under its own control. The bailiff con- 
firmed indentures of apprenticeship, and the 
chamberlains demanded a fee on the admission 
of a new member into a craft or mystery. 
Prices of bread and beer were fixed by the cor- 
poration, and ale-tasters were annually ap- 
pointed to enforce orders as to the quality and 
price of victuals. Searchers were also nominated 
to inspect the tanneries, and to prevent the 
common abuses in the preparation of leather 

110 



GROWTH OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 

which were prohibited by statutes of the realm 
in 1566 and 1603.^ 

It is essential for the student of the social 
history of Stratford to grasp clearly the leading 
differences between life in the sixteenth and in 
the nineteenth centuries, and of the first im- 
portance is it to realise how little personal 
liberty was understood in Elizabethan country 
towns. Scarcely an entry in the books of the 
new council fails to emphasise the rigidly 
paternal character of its rule. If a man lived 
immorally he was summoned to the guildhall, 
and rigorously examined as to the truth of the 
rumours that had reached the bailiff's ear. If 
his guilt was proved, and he refused to make 
adequate reparation, he was invited to leave 
the city. A female servant, hired at a salary of 
twenty-six shillings and eightpence and a pair 
of shoes, left her master suddenly in 1611. The 
aldermen ordered her arrest on her master's 
complaint. Her defence was that 'she was 
once frightened in the night in the chamber 

1 For the general social condition of the reformed munici- 
pality, see Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps's invaluable Life of Shake- 
speare, his New Place (1864), and his privately printed publication 
containing the Chamberlain's Accounts 1564-1618, and the Council 
Books (A and B). 

Ill 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

where her master's late wife died, but by what 
or whom she cannot tell'; but this plea proved 
of no avail, and she spent some months in the 
gaol by the guildhall. Rude endeavours were 
made to sweeten the tempers of scolding wives. 
A substantial ' cucking stool,' with iron staples, 
lock, and hinges, was kept in good repair. The 
shrew was attached to it, and by means of ropes, 
planks, and wheels, was plunged two or three 
times into the Avon whenever the municipal 
council believed her to stand in need of cor- 
rection. Three days and three nights were 
invariably spent in the open stocks by any in- 
habitant who spoke disrespectfully to any town 
officer, or who disobeyed any minor municipal 
decree. No one might receive a stranger into 
his house without the bailiif's permission. No 
journeyman, apprentice, or servant might *be 
forth of their or his master's house' after nine 
o'clock at night. Bowling alleys and butts 
were provided by the council, but were only to 
be used at stated times. An alderman was 
fined on one occasion for going to bowls after 
a morning meeting of the council, and Henry 
Sydnall was fined twenty pence for keeping 
unlawful or unlicensed bowling in a back shed. 

112 



GROWTH OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 

Alehouse-keepers, of whom there were thirty 
in Stratford in Shakespeare's time, were kept 
strictly under the council's control. They were 
not allowed to brew their own ale, or to encour- 
age tippling, or to serve poor artificers except at 
stated hours of the day, on pain of fine and 
imprisonment. Dogs were not to go about the 
streets unmuzzled. Every inhabitant had to go 
to church at least once a month, and absentees 
were liable to penalties of twenty pounds, which 
in the late years of Elizabeth's reign commis- 
sioners came from London to see that the local 
authorities enforced. Early in the seventeenth 
century swearing was rigorously prohibited. 
Laws as to dress were always regularly en- 
forced. In 1577 there were many fines exacted 
for failure to wear the plain statute woollen 
caps on Sundays, to which Rosaline makes 
reference in Loves Labour's Lost, and the 
regulation affected all inhabitants above six 
years of age. In 1604 'the greatest part' 
of the population were presented at a great 
leet, or law-day, 'for wearing their apparel 
contrary to the statute.' Nor would it be 
difficult to quote many other like proofs of 
the persistent strictness with which the new 
N 113 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

town council of Stratford, by the enforcement 
of its own orders and of the statutes of the 1 
realm, regulated the inhabitants' whole conduct 
of life. 



114 



JOHN SHAKESPEARE IN MUNICIPAL OFFICE 
AND IN TRADE 

It was this sober form of government that 
demanded William Shakespeare's allegiance 
from youth to the close of his life, and in his 
later days there can be no doubt of his loyal 
conformity to all its precise edicts. It was of 
this government that his father, John Shake- 
speare, was an energetic member, filling all the 
chief offices, from ale-taster and constable to 
that of bailiff and chief alderman, between 1557 
and 1577 ; and from his boyhood every detail of 
municipal organisation must have been familiar 
to the poet. 

Before 1557 his father was a leading or 
* capital ' burgess and a member of the town 
council. He was an ale- taster in 1557, and had 
to enforce the order 'that all the brewers, that 

115 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

brew to sell either ale or beer, shall sell their ale 
or beer for threepence the gallon under the hair- 
sieve [i.e. new], and threepence-halfpenny the 
gallon stale, and thirteen gallons to the dozen, 
and that no victualler and no alehouse-keeper 
shall sell any ale or beer contrary to this order ; 
and that all bakers that bake bread to sell shall 
sell four [i.e. quarter] loaves for a penny, two 
[i.e. half] loaves for a penny, and one [i.e. 
whole] loaf for a penny, and so to keep the 
assize [the testing of weights and measures] 
delivered every Thursday at night, upon pain 
of imprisonment.' On 30th September 1558, 
and again on 6th October 1559, John Shake- 
speare was chosen one of the four constables, 
and had to direct the watch throughout the 
year, and, Dogberry-like, once every month, 
from Michaelmas to Candlemas or oftener, 'as 
the case requireth it, to call to him certain 
of the council and some other honest men, 
and keep and have a privy watch for the good 
rule of the town.' In 1559 and in 1561 he was 
one of the four ' affeerors ' — officers who 
assessed in the court - leets fines for minor 
offences, for which the statutes prescribed no 
express penalties. From 1561 to 1564 he was 

116 



JOHN SHAKESPEARE 

a chamberlain, and duly presented year by year 
the municipal accounts. 

On 4th July 1565 John Shakespeare reached 
the dignity of an alderman. He took the 
place of William Bott, a wealthy capitalist 
from Coventry, who relieved William Clopton, 
an heir of Sir Hugh, of some of his pecuniary 
difficulties by purchasing New Place of him 
in 1563. Bott was of a quarrelsome temper. 
He was evidently one of those self-sufficient 
blusterers whom William Shakespeare delighted 
to honour with his ridicule in characters like 
Bottom and Dogberry. In 1565 Bott brought 
an action against Richard Sponer, a poor 
painter, inhabiting a cottage in Chapel Lane, 
for stealing twelve pieces of squared timber 
from his garden, and at the same time he had 
a serious dispute with his fellow-councillors. 
He spoke evil words of Master Bailiff and 
others. He said that 'there was never an 
honest man of the council,' whereupon he ' was 
sent for and did not come to his answer.' 
On the contrary, he gave ' such opprobrious 
words that he was not,' in his fellow-councillors' 
opinion, ' worthy henceforth to be of the 
council,' and was consequently ' expulsed, to 

117 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

be none of the company.' It was Bott's 
disgrace that secured John Shakespeare his 
alderman's gown. Three years later, at 
Michaelmas 1568, John rose higher and became 
bailifP, and on 5th September 1571 he was 
chief alderman, a post which he retained till 
3rd September of the following year. After 
Michaelmas 1572 he ceased to take an active 
part in municipal affairs. The duties of the 
aldermen could not be well performed by poor 
men. In 1563 and 1564, when John Shake- 
speare was chamberlain, he had been able to 
advance as much as £3, 2s. 7|^d. to the cor- 
poration, but as the century grew older his 
monetary resources failed him. In 1564, when 
the plague raged at Stratford, he had liberally 
contributed to the funds raised by the alder- 
men in behalf of their poor and afflicted 
neighbours. In 1576 he paid twelvepence to- 
wards the beadle's salary; but in 1578 he was 
unable to supply his share of the payments 
privately made by his fellow-councillors 'to- 
wards the furniture of three pikemen, two 
billmen, and one archer,' who were apparently 
sent by the corporation to attend a muster 
of the trained bands of the county. Nor was 

118 



JOHN SHAKESPEAKE 

he at the same time able to give the small sum 
of fourpence for the relief of the poor. Failure 
to pay such pecuniary dues as these combined, 
with long-continued absence from the ' halls,' 
to cause the corporation, on 6th September 
1586, to deprive John Shakespeare of his alder- 
man's gown. He thus retired from public life 
when his son William was twenty- two years 
of age, and in no position to give his father 
any assistance. 

John Shakespeare's assumption of municipal 
office would prove, in the absence of all other 
evidence, that he was engaged in trade in the 
town. The first bailiff whose name is recorded 
was a skinner, and all his successors, with rare 
exceptions, were business men. When John 
Shakespeare was first proposed for that office 
in 1567, the rival candidates were a butcher 
and a brewer. John Shakespeare's mercantile 
occupation has been a matter of endless con- 
troversy. It is certain that on 17th June 1556 
he sued, in the capacity of a glover, before John 
Burbage, the bailiff, one Thomas Siche, of 
Arscotte, Worcestershire, for a debt of eight 
pounds ; and between 1565 and 1579, whenever 
he attached his mark to official documents 

119 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

(there is doubt whether or no he could write), 
he rudely drew the glover's trade-mark — an 
instrument resembling the stretcher still used 
by sellers of gloves. Twenty-three years later 
he was always described as a yeoman. But 
here is no real inconsistency. Stratford still re- 
tained many agricultural characteristics. Small 
farmers lived there in number, and, except 
those inhabitants exclusively engaged in some 
recognised urban manufacture, they dealt in 
all the products yielded by the cultivation of 
land and stock. Thus, in 1597 George Perry, 
of Stratford, was described as using, ' besides 
his glover's trade, buying and selling of wool 
and corn, and making of malt,' and Richard 
Castell, of Rother Market, was a glover, ' while 
his wife uttereth weekly two strikes of malt.' 
Joyce Hobday, a widow, was similarly selling 
at one time wool, calves' leather, and gloves. 
John Shakespeare's business was, doubtless, of 
even wider extent. He cultivated far more 
land than the majority of his neighbours. 
About 1557 he married Mary Arden, the 
youngest daughter of Robert Arden, of Wilm- 
cote, his father's old landlord, and she had 
inherited from her father 'all his land in 

120 



JOHN SHAKESPEARE 

Wilmcote called Ashbies, and the crop upon 
the ground, sown and tilled as it is,' and was, 
with her sister Alice, her father's residuary 
legatee, which gave her arable and pasture 
land at the little village of Snitterfield. About 
1570 John purchased a small farm called Ingon 
Meadow, containing fourteen acres, for eight 
pounds. The produce of these estates was, 
doubtless, sold by John Shakespeare at Strat- 
ford. As early as 1556 we find him complaining 
that his neighbour, Henry Field, unjustly de- 
tained barley belonging to him. In 1564 he 
sold timber to the corporation. Sheep, meat, 
skins, wool, and leather were among the 
commodities in which he dealt. That his 
business transactions were numerous is proved 
by the frequency of his suits for the recovery 
of debts in the local courts between 1557 and 
1595. His failure after 1580 was probably due 
to some unfortunate speculation in corn, or to 
the recurrence of dearths, of which dealers 
were forbidden by statute law, strictly enforced 
by the town council, to take any commercial 
advantage. 



o 121 



XI 

THE STRATFORD INDUSTRIES AND POPULATION 

Despite the absence of strict divisions of trade, 
and the trading b y one person in many distantly- 
related commodities, John Shakespeare's and 
his son's contemporaries maintained the trade 
societies initiated by their mediseval pre- 
decessors, and descriptions of the various 
trading companies are still extant. These 
societies often embraced the followers of more 
trades than one, but each society was a very 
close corporation. *The weaver's art,' as in 
the thirteenth century, held among them the 
first place. There were, besides, mysteries 
or crafts of skinners, tailors, shoemakers, 
saddlers, glovers, whittawers {i.e. tanners of 
white leathers), and coUarmakers ; a company 
of chandlers, soapmakers, ironmongers, and 
bakers, survived beyond 1726. Pewterers, 

122 



THE STRATFORD INDUSTRIES 

butchers, brewers, drapers, grocers, carpenters, 
and painters were also numerous in the town. 

Orders were frequently passed bidding no 
person set up any trade or occupation * before 
he be made free of its company,' and enjoin- 
ing on every one the necessity of * sorting him- 
self into one company or another,' but almost 
all the shopkeepers, like John Shakespeare, 
contrived to follow more than one trade. Thus 
Adrian Quiney, a prominent mercer, dealt, to- 
gether with his wife, in such various com- 
modities as ginger, red lead, Southwich cloth, 
lime, salad oil, and deal boards. This Quiney 
owned a house in Henley Street, and was 
bailiff in 1572; his grandson Richard was an 
intimate friend of the poet, and his great- 
grandson Thomas married Judith Shakespeare, 
the poet's younger daughter, just before her 
father's death in 1616. Shoemaking seems to 
have formed a more exclusive industry. Among 
the chief shoemakers of the town was a name- 
sake of John Shakespeare, possibly a cousin, 
living in 1590 in Bridge Street. He filled 
municipal office as constable and ale-taster in 
1585, and was master of the company of shoe- 
makers in 1585. In 1587 he was in pecuniary 

123 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

difficulties, and received a loan of five pounds 
from the corporation out of Oken's Charity — a 
fund bequeathed to the tovrn by Thomas Oken, 
of Warv^ick, in 1570, for the relief of poor 
tradesmen. Soon afterwards he appears to 
have left Stratford. 

Certain regulations like those enforced 
upon bakers and breviers by the ale-tasters, 
or those enforced by the tannery searchers, 
hampered, w^ith advantage to the consumer, 
the freedom of trade. There were customs of 
stretching and straining cloths, and of chalk- 
ing and 'otherwise deceitfully making them,' 
which were frequently prohibited under rigorous 
penalties. Leather was often imperfectly tanned 
and made hollow by divers mixtures, such as 
obnoxious fats, so that 'boots within two or 
three days' wearing will straightway become 
brown as a hare-back; and, which is more, 
fleet and run about like a dishclout; and 
which is most of all, hold out no water or 
very little.' Horse-hide was often sold for 
ox-hide. Corn dealers were ordered, under 
heavy penalties, in 1506, not to 'ingross, fore- 
stall, or regrate,' but ' to furnish the market 
rateably and weekly' with fixed quantities. 

124 



THE STRATFORD INDUSTRIES 

These prohibitions often affected traders 
disastrously, but their customers invariably- 
benefited. 

Trade was maintained at a normal rate of 
briskness by the weekly markets and the half- 
yearly fairs, the chief of which fell in Sep- 
tember. The town council strictly regulated 
the procedure of the fairs, and appointed to 
each trade a station in the streets. Thus, raw 
hides at markets and fairs were to be laid 
down at the cross in Rother Market. Sellers 
of butter, cheese, all manner of white meat, 
wick-yarn, and fruits were to set up their stalls 
by the cross at the chapel. A site in the High 
Street was assigned to country butchers, who 
repaired to the town with their flesh, hides, 
and tallow. Pewterers were ordered to ' pitch ' 
their wares in Wood Street, and to pay for 
the ground they occupied fourpence a yard. 
Saltwains, whose owners did a thriving trade 
in days when salted meats formed the staple 
supply of food, were permitted to stand about 
the cross in Rother Market. At various points 
the victuallers were permitted to erect booths. 
These regulations were needful to prevent 
strife, and fines for breach of the rules often 

125 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

reached as large a sum as five pounds. The 
townsmen were anxious to secure for them- 
selves all the advantages of these gatherings, 
and the council often employed men armed 
with cudgels to keep Coventry traders out of 
the town. 

These details, which are drawn from the 
council books of the Stratford Corporation 
from 1557 to 1607, indicate much commercial 
activity. For a country town, we may judge 
Stratford to have been fairly populous. We 
know that the commissioners appointed to 
report on the guild in 1547 stated the chapel 
to be the chief place of worship for fifteen 
hundred 'houseling people,' i.e. persons accus- 
tomed to take the holy sacrament. In 1562 
there appeared to have been about thirty 
householders in each of the twelve streets of 
the town, which would roughly show a popu- 
lation of two thousand persons. Plagues, like 
the disastrous one of 1564, were continually 
reducing the population, but new arrivals from 
the neighbouring villages appear to have main- 
tained it at a fairly steady average. Small 
farmers were finding agriculture growing year 
by year less profitable ; the great city merchants 

126 



THE STRATFORD INDUSTRIES 

had long been buying up arable-land to trans- 
form it into pasture-land, sheep and wool were 
now more profitable commodities than wheat or 
barley or oats, and the new landlords only culti- 
vated their estates with a view to securing the 
largest profits. Far less labour was required 
in tending sheep than in growing corn. Agri- 
cultural labourers, therefore, found their services 
at a discount, and flocked to the towns. The 
yeomen too found it to their advantage to 
move into towns, where their produce could 
readily find purchasers. Stratford, we have 
seen, attracted a rich man like William Bott 
from Coventry, about 1560. Some years before 
it had attracted from the neighbouring village 
of Snitterfield John Shakespeare himself. 



127 



XII 

JOHN Shakespeare's first settlement in 

STRATFORD — THE STREETS 

It was, in all probability, in 1551, just before 
the borough had reached the all -important 
stage of incorporation, that John Shakespeare 
first came to Stratford. In the Middle Ages 
there were no Shakespeares at Stratford. But 
in the surrounding districts families of the name 
were numerous. Thus, among the members of 
a guild — which closely resembled the Stratford 
guild — at Knoll, near Hampton-in-Arden, Shake- 
speares, Shaxpers, Shakespeyres, Shakspeeres, 
called Richard, John, William, Agnes, Isabella, are 
found repeatedly between 1464 and 1555. Some 
of these lived at Rowington, and can be traced 
there till the close of the eighteenth century; 
one Thomas Shakespeare, of Rowington, was 
a disciple of Jack Cade. A family of Shake- 

128 



THE STREETS 

speares also lived at Warwick till the close of 
the sixteenth century, and on 16th June 1579 
William, one of these, according to the register 
in the church of St. Nicholas, Warwick, met 
his death by drowning in the river Avon. (How 




SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHPLACE BEFORE RESTORATION. 



invaluable might this piece of evidence prove 
to the monomaniacs who believe that Bacon 
wrote Will Shakespeare's plays !) 

But the poet, although doubtless col- 
laterally related to many of these families, 
was directly descended from none of them. 
John Shakespeare probably belonged to a 
p 129 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

branch residing in the sixteenth century at 
Snitterfield, a little village four miles to the 
north of Stratford, and the Richard Shakespeare 
who was a farmer, renting there of Robert 
Arden of Wilmcote a small tenement, with a 
little land attached to it, in 1550, was doubtless 
John's father and the poet's grandfather. 

Snitfield, or Snitterfield, had seen days of 
commercial prosperity, but it was at this time 
chiefly occupied by small farmers and their 
labourers. It had a church at the time of the 
Norman Conquest, and in 1242 a market and 
a fair had been granted it. As a manor it 
had successively belonged to a monastery of 
Bordsl^y and to many Earls of Warwick, and it 
came, in the sixteenth century, into the hands 
of John Hales, the founder of a free school at 
Coventry — a very wealthy man, whose lame- 
ness, the result of an accident, gained for him 
the sobriquet of ' Hales with the club foot.' In 
1552 John Shakespeare was living in Henley 
Street, Stratford, but it was not until 1556 that 
he purchased houses in the town. In that year 
he entered into copyhold possession of two 
tenements, one with a garden and croft (i.e. an 
enclosed plot of land), in Greenhill Street, at a 

130 



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THE STREETS 

rental of sixpence, and another, with a garden 
only, in Henley Street. But these dwellings he 
apparently let again, and continued to reside in 
the house he had first occupied in Henley Street. 
This tenement he bought, with its gardens, 
orchards, and the house adjoining, which had 
been previously in his occupation for business 
purposes, for forty pounds, in 1575. It was in an 
upper story of the former of these houses that 
his son William was born in 1564, probably on 
23rd April. He was baptized in the parish 
church on the 26th.^ 

It is of interest to note that the nearest 
neighbours of John Shakespeare were on one 
side William Wedgewood, whose residence was 
soon distinguished by a sign of a bell, and 
on the other side George Badger, a draper, 
who was once constable of the town. Next to 
Wedgewood's house was that in the occupation 

1 An invaluable source of biographical information in regard 
to Shakespeare and his contemporaries who lived at his native 
place has lately been made generally accessible by the publication 
(by the Parish Registers Society) of The Registers of Stratforcl- 
on-Avon (3 vols., 1897, 1898, 1905): Vol. i., Baptisms, 1558-1652; 
Vol. ii.. Marriages, 1558-1812; Vol. iii.. Burials, 1558-1652-3. The 
volumes are printed from transcripts of the Registers executed 
by Mr. Richard Savage, Secretary and Librarian of the Trustees 
of Shakespeare's Birthplace. 

131 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

of Richard Hornebye, who is believed to have 
been a blacksmith.^ It was, doubtless, among 
the children of Wedgewood, Badger, and Horne- 
bye that William Shakespeare found his earliest 
playfellows. With Richard Hornebye's son and 
successor, Thomas, the poet was to engage in later 
life in a bitter legal strife. 

It may be well to follow John Shakespeare 
from his first entrance into the town, and take 
a survey of it in his company. We shall thus 
gain some knowledge of that aspect of it with 
which his son William was familiar in his youth. 
John Shakespeare would have originally entered 
Stratford by the Warwick Road, near which 
Snitterfield lies, and would have found himself 
on arrival at the bottom of Bridge Street, by 
the causeway leading to the stone bridge. 
Leland, the antiquarian traveller of 1530, said 
of the general appearance presented by Strat- 

1 The houses occupied by Wedgewood and Badger have been 
demolished and their sites left vacant in order to isolate John 
Shakespeare's property, which was acquired in 1847 on behalf of 
the public as a national memorial of Shakespeare, and is now 
owned by the Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust, which was incor- 
porated by Act of Parliament in 1891. Richard Hornebye's 
cottage was presented to the Trustees by Mr. Andrew Carnegie 
in 1903, and is now used as their offices. The lower floor has 
been converted into a ticket-office for visitors to the Birthplace, 
and the upper floor into a boardroom. 

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THE STREETS 

ford to a stranger, *It hath two or three long 
streets, besides back lanes. One of the principal 
streets leadeth from east to west, and another 
from north to south. . . . The town is reason- 
able well builded of timber.' Passing up Bridge 
Street, which led on from east to west, the new- 
comer came upon a small row of shops and 
stalls in the centre of the road known as Middle 
Row, of which the south side was Bridge Street, 
and the north, Back Bridge Street. It was in 
Bridge Street, it will be remembered, that John 
Shakespeare, the shoemaker, had his stall. The 
row was pulled down less than a century ago to 
form the wide thoroughfare of modern Bridge 
Street. In Bridge Street stood the three chief 
inns of the town — the Swan, the Bear, and the 
Crown, of which the latter is believed to have 
occupied the site of the present Red Horse 
Hotel; and for many years a large house there, 
at the corner of High Street, known as the 
Cage, and probably at one time the prison, was 
in the occupation of Henry Smith, a vintner. 
When the top of Bridge Street was reached, it 
divided into two roads — Wood Street to the left 
and Henley Street to the right — and the latter 
goon led into the country. Wood Street ran on 

135 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

into Greenhill Street, afterwards Moor Town's 
End, which, though still retaining a rural hedge, 
was fringed with a few houses. Behind Henley 
Street lay gravel-pits belonging to the guild, 
which were largely used in the repair of the 
bridge, and in rare paving operations in the 
town; but no inhabitant was allowed to help 
himself there. At right angles to the west end 
of Wood Street was Rother Market, where 
a stone cross stood, and there the borough's 
weekly cattle market was held ; ^ lanes led from 
Rother Market to Evesham. 

The chief or market cross of the town was at 
the head, i.e. the west end of Bridge Street, at 
the corner of High Street, which ran parallel to 
Rother Market. It was a stone monument 
covered by a low tiled shed, round which forms 
were placed for the accommodation of listeners 
to the sermons, which, as at St. Paul's Cross, 
London, were occasionally delivered there. At 
a later date a room was placed above it, and a 
clock above that. The open space about it 
formed the chief market-place of the town, and 

1 Near the site of the old stone cross now stands the elaborate 
fountain presented to the town by George W. Childs of Phila- 
delphia, and unveiled by Henry Irving on 17th October 1887. 

136 



THE STREETS 

its site is now occupied by a house known as 
the Market-house. At the pump which stood 
near it housewives were frequently to be seen 
'washing of clothes,' and hanging them up on 
the cross to dry, or the butchers might be de- 
tected hanging meat there ; but these practices 
were disapproved of by the corporation, and 
finally forbidden in 1608. The stocks, pillory, 
and whipping - post were set up hard by the 
cross. 

From the high or market cross, the street that 
ran in a south - westerly direction introduced 
the visitor to the most substantial buildings of 
the town, and from the householders there the 
bailiff was usually chosen. In other parts of 
Stratford most of the houses were detached ; 
here there were a few vacant spaces, but the 
houses mostly adjoined each other. The first 
portion was the High Street, and mainly con- 
sisted of shops. The second portion was 
Chapel Street, and among the large private 
houses there stood New Place, which in 1597 
became William Shakespeare's property. The 
lower end of the street was known as Church 
Street, and at the corner, facing New Place, 
was the chapel of the guild, succeeded by the 

137 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

school, guildhall, gaol, and almshouses. Above 
the chapel-porch was a third cross, and near at 
hand a second pump, which was removed by 
the council's order in 1595, and its site filled 
with gravel and rubbish. Turning to the 
left at the end of the street. Old Town was 
reached, where gardens and unoccupied land 
surrounded several large houses. John Hall, 
one of the poet's sons-in-law, had a residence 
there early in the seventeenth century. This 
road ultimately led to the churchyard and to 
the parish church, by the banks of the river, 
' a fair large piece of work,' as Leland describes 
it, '. . . at the south end of the town.' Over 
against the church was a stately residence of 
the Combes, formerly the College of Stratford, 
and but a little way down the road that ran 
between its grounds and the churchyard were 
the river-mill and the mill-bridge, which was not 
pulled down till late in the eighteenth century. 
By the river, near the church, doubtless stood 
the cucking-stool for the scolding wives, and a 
field belonging to the town in the near neigh- 
bourhood was known as the bank-croft, or ban- 
croft, where drovers and farmers of the town 
were allowed to take their cattle to pasture for 

138 



THE STREETS 

an hour a day. 'All horses, geldings, mares, 
swine, geese, ducks, and other cattle' found 
there contrary to this regulation were im- 
pounded by the beadle in the pinfold, which 
was situated close at hand. 

The back lanes of which Leland wrote 
stretched from Bother Market to the river, 
and intersected High Street and its continua- 
tions. The chief of them was Ely Street, or 
Swine Street, joining High Street at its junc- 
tion with Chapel Street, and running to the 
Avon as Sheep, or Ship, Street. Parallel with 
these roads were Scholar's Lane, or Tinker's 
Lane, crossing Chapel Street by New Place, 
and thence to the river bearing the name of 
Chapel Lane, or Dead Lane, or Walker Street. 
In both Tinker's and Chapel Lanes were 
gravel-pits, digging in which was strictly for- 
bidden within eight feet of the road. Many 
cottages in the smaller thoroughfares did 
service as alehouses. 



Q 139 



XIII 

THE CONSTRUCTION AND FURNITURE OF THE 
HOUSES— THE GARDENS 

The visitor to modern Stratford will learn from 
this account of the streets of the town in the 
sixteenth century how kindly time has dealt 
with their names. Nor of the outward appear- 
ances of the houses in Shakespeare's day will 
his own observation fail to give him a good 
conception. The majority of them, two stories 
high, were constructed of timber beams, set 
crosswise far apart, with the panels or inter- 
stices of lath and plaster. The roofs were 
usually of thatch, with dormer windows nest- 
ling there when the front wall did not rise into 
steep gables. Porches shaded the door; often 
a narrow, slanting, tiled or wooden roof ran 
along the house front over the window on the 
ground floor, and beneath this kind of shed, 

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called a pentice or penthouse, the smaller 
traders set a stall for their goods. The better 
houses in High Street and Chapel Street, like 
New Place, were of timber and brick, instead 
of plaster, and Shakespeare appears to have 
rebuilt the greater part of his residence with 
stone, of which the College was wholly con- 
structed. Tiled roofs were characteristic of 
such buildings, but at times an owner of con- 
servative tendencies would insist on the superi- 
ority of thatch, like Walter Roche, who moved 
into a house in Chapel Street in 1582, and 
replaced the tiles with thatch. Occasionally 
the woodwork in the front of the houses, as in 
the surviving example in High Street, built 
in 1596, was carefnlly carved with fleurs de 
lis and interlacing designs, and the oriel 
windows and overhanging beams were sup- 
ported by carved brackets. Chapel Lane, one 
of the streets well within the town, and others 
in its outlying districts, like the rural parts 
of Henley and Greenhill Streets, were chiefly 
occupied by barns, where the grain from the 
neighbouring country, largely cultivated by 
the townsmen, was stored. These were con- 
structed like the smaller dwelling-houses — of 

143 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

timber, lath, and plaster, and were invariably 
thatched. 

The gardens of the houses were separated 
from each other by mud walls, which were con- 
structed of clay, road-sand, or mud, and usually 
thatched at the top. In constant need of repair, 
they afforded little protection against robbers, 
who often forced their way through them. The 
land about the houses was very generally 
planted with fruit-trees, and the orchard about 
the guild buildings was noted for its plums and 
apples. The garden of New Place was long 
famed for its mulberries. Pleasure gardens 
were an exclusive characteristic of the great 
manor-houses in the surrounding country, but 
it is certain that flowers and a few cooking and 
medicinal plants were cultivated in the small 
plots in the town, and it is quite possible that 
more ambitious attempts at horticulture were 
made in the exceptionally large gardens of 
New Place and the College. Elm-trees were a 
very common feature of the Stratford gardens. 
In 1582 it was reported to the council that of 
four backyards in Dead or Chapel Lane — the 
street where the barns predominated — there 
were eleven elms and one ash-tree growing in 

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one of them, twenty-six elms in another, one in 
the third and four in the fourth. Several 
gardens in Henley Street could boast of at 
least four elms, and elm-trees marking the 
borough's boundaries on the Birmingham and 
Evesham roads were surveyed with much 
ceremony in Rogation Week year after year 
by the town officers. Thus the town was well 
shaded in summer, and he who would learn the 
rudiments of forestry had little need to go far 
afield. Shakespeare frequently indicates a sig- 
nificant familiarity with the pruning of trees 
and the simpler operations of horticulture. 
His gardener in Richard II, has no dilettante 
acquaintance with the method of cutting off 
'the heads of too fast-growing sprays,' or of 
rooting away — 

The noisome weeds, that without profit suck 
The soil's fertility from wholesome flowers. 

At the proper season he wounds 

The bark, the skin of our fruit-trees ; 
Lest, being over-proud with sap and blood, 
With too much riches it confound itself. 

Others of Shakespeare's characters give very 
adequate explanation of the gardener's hatred 
of weeds, of 'hateful dock, rough thistles, 

147 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

kexies, burs,' of 'tooth'd briars, sharp furzes, 
pricking gorse and thorns ' ; they well knew the 
evil work wrought by ' envious worms and 
caterpillars,' and were not ignorant of the uses 
of manure for those roots 

That shall first spring and be most delicate. 

lago's specious philosophy finds its most vigor-, 
ous expression in his comparison of ' our 
bodies ' to ' our gardens, to the which our wills 
are gardeners,' where we may ' plant nettles or 
sow lettuce ; set hyssop and weed up thyme ; 
supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it 
with many.' This practical knowledge was 
doubtless acquired while the poet was working 
with his father in the garden or orchard about 
his home in Henley Street, and was developed 
later in the ' great garden ' about his own 
residence in Chapel Street. 

The interior of the Elizabethan houses of 
Stratford had little of what we understand by 
comfort. In the smaller houses for a long 
period chimneys were rare. A mere hole in 
the wall allowed the smoke to escape. In 
many cases the internal space was not par- 
titioned off. The ground floor formed a single 

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THE GARDENS 

'hall,' and 'each one made his fire against 
a reredos in the hall, where he dined and 
dressed his meat.' In the case of the larger 
houses, the hall was likewise the chief apart- 
ment, and a single loft above, sometimes divided, 
formed the only sleeping-room, but here there 
was usually a parlour and another chamber cut 
off from the hall and cellars and outhouses 
devoted to the buttery. A change for the 
better in the matter of chimneys came over 
Stratford towards the close of the century. 
They were added to many of the little tene- 
ments of Middle Row, and John Shakespeare's 
house in Henley Street could certainly boast of 
one of them. A chimney was constructed for 
the kitchen at the guild chambers, and in 1582 
an order was passed by the town council that 
' Walter Hill, dwelling in Rother Market, and 
all the other inhabitants of the borough, shall, 
before St. James's Day, 30th April, make suffi- 
cient chimneys,' under pain of a fine of ten 
shillings. To the absence of chimneys the con- 
tinual recurrence of severe fires at Stratford in 
the sixteenth century was mainly due. 

Of the furniture of such a house as that in 
which the poet was born in Henley Street, 

151 



STRATFORD-ON- A V^ON 

we obtain an adequate account from an in- 
ventory made in 1592, on the death of Henry 
Field, tanner, a near neighbour of John Shake- 
speare. John Shakespeare was his chief exe- 
cutor. In the hall there was 'one table upon 
a joined frame, five small joint stools, a small 
chair, a wainscot bench, and painted cloths,' 
i.e. hangings of cloth or canvas painted in oil. 
There was evidently a stove there, doubtless 
the only one in the house, for andirons, fire 
shovel, tongs, pothooks, and pothangers are 
among the furnishings. In the parlour, the 
sitting-room by day and bedroom apparently 
by night, was a small table upon a frame, two 
joint stools, two chairs, a press, a joined bed, 
and a small plank. * Item, three painted cloths, 
one feather bed, one flock bed, two bolsters, 
one pillow, one bed covering of yellow and 
green, four old blankets, and one old carpet.' 
A long chest in the room contained coarse 
sheets, coarse table cloths, coarse wipers {i.e. 
dusters), and table napkins. In a shorter 
coffer were three pairs of flaxen sheets, one 
pair of hempen sheets, one flaxen table cloth, 
another of hemp, half a dozen table napkins 
of flax and one of hemp, two diaper napkins, 

152 







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THE GARDENS 

and four pillow-cases of flax. In the battery- 
were dishes, pewter platters, saucers, porridge 
dishes, salt cellars, candlesticks, a qviart pot, a 
pint pot, and two flower pots. Of brass there 
were three pots, a little pan, six skimmers, a 
basin, one chafing dish, a frying pan, and a 
dripping pan. There were also in the buttery 
four spits, great and small, and a pair of cup- 
boards. In the chamber next the parlour were 
a truckle bed which could be rolled up by day, 
an old coverlet, an old bolster, an old blanket, 
a little round table, and two old chests. In a 
little room adjoining were more beds, coffers, 
and a press of boards with shelves. In the 
kitchen house were six barrels of beer, five 
looms, four pails, four forms, three stools, one 
bolting hutch, two ' skips ' for taking up yeast, 
one vat, a table board, two pair of trestles, and 
two strikes {i,e. bushel measures), besides an 
axe, shovels, and spade. In an upper chamber 
were more beds and bedding, a cheese-crate, 
malt, malt shovels, a beam with scales, two 
dozen trenchers, and one dozen pewter spoons. 
In the yard were bundles of laths, loads of 
wood, buckets, cord and windlass for the well, 
and a watchman's bill. 

R 155 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

Another house, the property of a wooldriver, 
of which John Shakespeare also made an in- 
ventory, contained a similar array of tables, 
chairs, beds, bedding, painted cloths, and brass 
and pewter implements. There were also three 
green cushions for a window seat, a curtain 
for the window, and pots of earth and glass. 
The presence of brewing utensils and looms 
in both instances show that it was customary 
to brew ale and weave wool at home. But 
what gaps suggest themselves in these in- 
ventories to the modern reader ! Henry Field's 
wealth of table napkins, which were used freely 
after the meal was done, emphasise the total 
absence of knives and forks. Jugs, basins, and 
towels are conspicuously rare. 

It is noticeable, too, how the furnitures of 
the sleeping-rooms and sitting-rooms encroached 
upon one another, and how gradually the 
modern distinction grew up. The cooking was 
chiefly done in the hall, upon which the front 
door opened ; and there the pothooks and 
hangers were always kept. The tables, as a 
rule, were made with flaps, to 'turn up.' 
Capulet, when he wants room for the dancers 
in his hall, shouts out to his servants to * turn 

156 



THE GARDENS 

the tables up.' The painted cloths, or arras, 
were features prominent in all Elizabethan 
houses, whether rich or poor. They were nailed 
on the walls of the guildhall, and even in the 
smaller cottages they were met with, bearing 
in all cases ' wise sayings painted upon them,' 
and frequently rough representations of Bible 
stories, especially of Dives and Lazarus and of 
' the pamper'd Prodigal.' Shakespeare writes 
of these hangings in ' Lucrece ' — 

Who fears a sentence, or an old man's saw, 
Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe. 

Orlando taunts Jaques with having studied his 
cynical questions from ' right painted cloth. 
Despite the scantiness of bedroom furniture, 
there was some attempt at decoration. The 
bed coverings, or counterpanes — there was one 
of yellow and green belonging to Henry Field 
— were often richly embroidered, like those in 
Gremio's city house. The carpet owned by 
Henry Field was doubtless to cover the table, 
not to lie beneath it. Grumio, Petruchio's ser- 
vant, sees ' the carpets laid ' for supper on the 
return home of his master and new mistress. 
The floors were strewn with rushes, or occa- 
sionally with sweet-smelling herbs. A Dutch 

159 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

physician, visiting London in 1560, notes how 
'the chambers and parlours strewn over with 
sweet herbs refreshed me.' Grumio bids the 
rushes be strewn in Petruchio's house ; and 
Romeo bids wantons, light of heart, 

Tickle the senseless rushes with their heels. 

Shakespeare, like his own Gremio, clearly took 
careful notice of the 

Pewter and brass, and all things that belong 
To house, or housekeeping. 



160 



XIV 

THE SANITARY CONDITION OF THE TOWN 

Sanitary arrangements within the house were 
obviously not much heeded. The clay floors, 
whether or no strewn with rushes, attracted all 
manner of refuse, and were rarely swept. The 
well in the garden and the town pump might have 
formed an adequate water supply ; but the uses 
of water were not generally known. The mud 
walls between the gardens were not conducive 
to cleanliness. Very few of the ordinary laws 
of health were, in fact, observed by the house- 
holders; and the corporation made very feeble 
attempts to enforce such of them as, when 
neglected, created very obvious nuisances. Fre - 
quent penalties were imposed on those who 
failed to scour and clean the gutters and ditches 
before their residences. But the difficulty of 
disposing of household refuse was very com- 
monly met by ' laying it in the streets and 

161 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

lanes,' or in these ditches and gutters. John 
Shakespeare appears to have been an habitual 
offender in this respect. His name first appears 
in any record of the municipality as owing a 
fine of twelvepence for having made a dirt heap 
with his neighbours Adrian Quiney and Henry 
Reynolds in Henley Street. Six years later 
he ' stood amerced ' in fourpence for failing to 
keep his gutter clean. In 1563, and subse- 
quent years, the exposure of domestic rubbish 
in the street rendered the offender liable to a 
forfeit of three shillings and fourpence, and 
' the tenant that renteth the ground ' upon 
which the ' muckhill ' stood, to one of ten shill- 
ings. Six places in the town were appointed 
for the amassing of the filth in legalised ' muck- 
hills.' One stood in Ship Street, another in 
Scholar's Lane, a third in Henley Street, but 
the chief was in Chapel Lane. They were, in 
almost all cases, at the rural end of the smaller 
streets; but as they were to be removed only 
' twice a year — that is to say, before the feast 
of Pentecost, and near about Michaelmas,' they 
were sufficiently near to human habitations 
to make them a constant source of danger 
to health and life. Butchers, it is true, were 

162 



£Mi^SiMi£ 



m^ 







2 H H 

S O a 

^ ai '■^ 

?^ '■^ ^ 

O M w: 



SANITARY CONDITION 

forbidden to use them, and were ordered, under 
a penalty of twenty shillings, to take their 
garbage out of the town at nine o'clock each 
evening. 

Chapel Lane, which ran by the side of New 
Place, was the filthiest part of the town. The 
small cottagers there habitually neglected the 
council's orders, and dispersed refuse in the 
open road, until it often became impassable. 
John Sadler, a miller, insisted on winnowing 
bis peas there, and leaving the chaff about. 
But this was a very innocent offence. Most 
of his neighbours kept pigs, who, in spite of 
repeatedly published prohibitions, were allowed 
to wander at their own sweet wills. If a pigs- 
cote or pigsty was built, it was on the lane's 
pathway, and fines could not break the house- 
holders of the practice. John Rogers, the 
vicar of Stratford, living by the guild chapel, 
in 1613 was remonstrated with by the council 
for an offence of this kind, and his irrelevant 
defence was to the effect that ' about my house 
there is no place of convenience without much 
annoyance to the chaple,' which was next door, 
and ' how far,' he proceeded, ' the breeding 
of such creatures is needful to poor house- 

165 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

keepers, I refer myself to those that can equal 
my charge,' i.e. have as many expenses as I. 
The town council issued an order in 1611 that 
' no swine be permitted to be in the open 
street of this town unless they have a keeper 
with them, and then only while they are in 
driving within this borough, upon pain for every 
strayer of fourpence.' But this produced little 
effect. Every time Shakespeare left his house 
in New Place (for the doorway was in Chapel 
Lane), he crossed the most noisome thorough- 
fare in the town; and Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps's 
suggestion that his death in 1616, like that of 
many of his townsmen, was due to the tainted 
atmosphere of his environment, seems only too 
probable. And Stratford saw no rapid im- 
provement in the matter. Garrick described 
the town in 1769 as 'the most dirty, unseemly, 
ill-pav'd, wretched-looking town in all Britain.' 

Paternal as was the tone of the town council's 
edicts, it never supplemented the householder's 
neglect of cleanliness by any really adequate 
provisions. It delegated the duty of keeping 
the streets clean to the townsfolk, and as they 
failed to perform this function the streets 
remained dirty. It alone undertook the cleans- 

166 



SANITARY CONDITION 

ing of the bridge, the market-place, and the 
space before the chapel door and guildhall ; 
but in these days of the glorification of 
hygiene there is a ludicrous ring about all 
the details of the arrangements made for this 
object. For the sweeping of the market-place, 
in Shakespeare's day, a widow named Baker 
was employed at a yearly salary of six shillings 
and eightpence, and she was provided, at the 
municipal expense, with a shovel, a broomstick, 
and twigs of trees. The duty of sweeping the 
bridge was entrusted to a man named Raven, 
who at times secured the additional services of 
the widow Baker. The chapel was rarely de- 
filed by water ; but on the occasion of the 
repair of its roof in 1604, Anthony Rees and 
his wife with goodwife Wilson were directed to 
sweep away the cobwebs and to wash the seats. 
Fresh rushes were occasionally laid in the 
council chamber and guildhall ; and the floor 
of the latter was renewed at intervals with 
clay. 

There was little pavement about the town. 

The market-place, in fact, alone was paved. 

But the bridge and the causeway were kept 

in fair order by the liberal sprinkling of gravel 

S 167 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

from the guild pits. In other parts of the town 
'logs and blocks' lay about the roadways, 
'to the nuisance of the king's liege people.' 
Arrangements were made for a short time in 
winter for the lighting of the town. In 1557 it 
was ordained that every alderman and 'capital' 
burgess, 'between 15th December and twenty 
days after Christmas, from five to eight o'clock 
in the evening, have a lanthorn hanging in the 
street before his door, and there a candle burn- 
ing to give light,' under pain to forfeit twelve- 
pence in default. In 1617 the dates ran from 
1st November to 2d February. 



168 



XV 

PLAGUES, FIRES, FLOODS, AND FAMINES 

The whole town had to pay heavy penalties 
of disease for its indifference to sanitary pre- 
cautions. The plague, a scourge of Christen- 
dom, whose horrors are barely paralleled by 
the fatal progresses now made from time to 
time in Europe by the Asiatic cholera, paid 
Stratford repeated visits. Few decades passed 
without its appearance among the townspeople. 
The infection rapidly passed from house to 
house, with its burning fevers and icy shiver- 
ings, its cureless pains and fatal languors. No 
remedy was known to produce much effect 
on the course of the disease. Bleedings and 
draughts of the plague -water were of no 
avail. Sorrel-water and verjuice, with oranges 
and lemons, allayed for a time the patient's 
thirst, and he was advised to take often, and 

169 



STRATFORD-ON-AYON 

in small quantities, light food like rabbit or 
chicken. 

Cleanliness was enjoined, with rare success, 
to prevent the spread of the contagion. Win- 
dows were to be kept open, and hung with 
green boughs of oak and willow; the floors to 
be strewn with sorrel, lettuce, roses, and oak- 
leaves, or with vinegar and rose-water ; sandal- 
wood and musk, aloes, amber, and cinnamon 
were to burn about the houses six hours a day. 
The lighting of fires of rosemary and bay was 
the sole precaution habitually taken in small 
cottages at these troublesome times (see Froude's 
History, vol. vii. pp. 74, 75). 

The claims of death rarely remained un- 
satisfied , high and low fell before the pestil- 
ence; and graves in the churchyards stood 
always open to receive new dwellers as soon 
as they had yielded their last breath. The 
most fearful epidemic that Stratford knew 
came in the summer of 1564, when William 
Shakespeare was two or three months old. 
One-seventh of the inhabitants of Stratford 
was swept away and consigned to the cemetery 
on the banks of the Avon. John Shakespeare's 
house was happily spared, and he did his duty 

170 



PLAGUES 

to his poor neighbours. The town council feared 
to meet in their chamber, but frequently assem- 
bled in the garden adjoining to discuss measures 
for the relief of the poor. Many twelvepences 
John Shakespeare and his fellow-councillors 
bestowed on * those that be visited ' between 
August and October of the fatal year. 

Of the terrors of the day one tradition pre- 
serves a vivid picture. Clopton manor-house 
was attacked. Charlotte Clopton, a young girl 
of the family, whose portrait shows fair bkie 
eyes and pale golden hair falling in wavy ring- 
lets on her neck, sickened of the disease, and, 
to all appearance, died. The body was hurried 
into the family tomb beneath Stratford church. 
Before a week had passed another of the house 
followed her, and was borne to the same vault. 
And there the bearers saw by their torches, 
on the steps leading from the church to the 
sepulchral chamber, Charlotte Clopton, in her 
grave-clothes, leaning against the wall. She was 
dead then, but it was clear that the plague had 
spared her : after she had been laid in the gloomy 
vault there had been a terrible struggle for life. 
Juliet's fears had a very real justification. Char- 
lotte Clopton had been stifled in the vault. 

171 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in, 
And there died strangled ere [assistance] came. 

Perhaps she had awoke 

Early — what with loathsome smells, 
And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth. 
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad : 

and had, as Juliet foretold, become distraught, 
Environed with all these hideous fears, 

Fire was another danger to life and property 
with which the municipal council failed to deal 
adequately. Towards the close of the century, 
in 1598, two severe fires visited the town, and 
so many houses were reported to be * decayed 
with fire,' that a special exemption from the 
national subsidies was granted the inhabitants. 
Barns seemed to have suffered repeatedly. 
The council, by its order of 1582, bidding all 
householders to erect chimneys for their houses, 
attempted to stem the fiery tide. They pur- 
chased five hooks as early as 1576 for pulling 
down threatened buildings, and one seems to 
have always been hung at the entrance to the 
guildhall. A wise precaution was contained in 
an edict enjoining on every burgess the neces- 
sity of having one leathern bucket, to be used 

172 



FLOODS 

in case of fire, and on every alderman that of 
having two. But, none the less, the town con- 
tinued to suffer, and parts of Henley Street 
seem often to have been aflame. 

A third danger to Stratford was less pre- 
ventible. The Avon, as it still continues to do, 
often flooded its banks, and it did no little 
injury from time to time to the bridge. Stone 
to fill a hole in the bridge was a frequent item 
of expenditure in the town's accounts. In 1598 
William Shakespeare, probably engaged in re- 
storing New Place, sold for that purpose one 
load of stone to the corporation for tenpence. 
A very disastrous flood visited Stratford in 1588, 
and in the parish register of the neighbouring 
village of Welford a picturesque account may 
be found of its coming. 

On the IStli day of July 1588 [runs the register], in 
the morning, there happened about eight of the 
clock, in Avon, such a sudden flood, as carried away 
all the hay about Avon. Old Father Porter, buried 
about four years past, being then a hundred and 
nine years of age, never knew it so high by a yard 
and a half. Dwelling in the mill-house, he, in former 
times, knew it under his bed, but this flood was a 
yard and a half in the house, and came in so suddenly 
that John Perry's wife was so amazed that she sate 

175 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

still till she was almost drowned, and was wellnigli 
beside herself, and so far amiss that she did not know 
her own child when it Avas brought in to her. It 
brake doAvn Grange Mill; the crack thereof was 
heard at Holditch. It brake up sundry houses in 
Warwick town, and carried away their bread, beef, 
cheese, butter, pots, pans, and provisions, and took 
away ten carts out of one town, and three wains, 
with the furniture of Mr. Thomas Lucy, and broke 
both ends of Stratford Bridge. That [flood] drowned 
three furlongs of corn in Thetf ord field. It was so 
high at the height that it unthatched the mill, and 
stocked up a number of willows and sallows, and did 
take away one [of] Sales's daughters of Grafton, out 
of Hillborough meadow, removing of the hay-cock, 
that she had no shift but to get upon the top of a 
hay-cock, and was carried thereupon by the water a 
quarter of a mile wellnigli, till she came to the very 
last bank of the stream, and there was taken into a 
boat, and all was like to be drowned, but that another 
boat coming rescued them soon. Three men going 
over Stratford Bridge, when they came to the middle 
of the bridge they could not go forward, and then 
returning presently, could not get back, for the 
water was so risen ; it rose a yard every hour from 
eight to four, that it came into the parsonage of 
Welford Orchard, and filled the fish-pool, and took 
away the sign-post at the Bear ; it carried away 
Edward Butler's cart, which was soon beneath Bid- 
ford, and it came into the vicarage of Weston, and 

176 




'1 ^■■'rrfn^^ 












T! O 



O < 



FLOODS 

made Adam Sandars thence remove, and took away 
half a hundred pounds of hay. 

So quaint a list of disasters well illustrates 
Shakespeare's own account, in MidsuiriTner 
Niglifs Dream i of how the winds — 

Falling in the land, 
Have every pelting river made so proud, 
That they have overborne their continents : 
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain, 
The ploughman lost his sweat ; and the green corn 
Hath rotted, ere his youth attained a beard. . . . 

It was doubtless at Stratford, too, that Shake- 
speare learnt how in such seasons 'the moon, 
the governess of floods, . . . washes all the 
air, 

That rheumatic diseases do abound.' 

Besides the dangers of plagues, fires, and 
floods, Stratford ran sometimes the risk of 
starvation. Grain at times was so scarce that 
the corporation had to distribute corn on its 
own account, and made an inventory of all to 
be found in the town. One of the most serious 
dearths occurred in 1598, and ' the note of corn 
and malt taken ' at the time is extant. John 
Shakespeare appears to have owned none, but 
his son, at New Place, had as much as ten 
T 179 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

quarters, a quantity which few of his neigbours 
exceeded. The laws enforced against grain- 
dealers, prohibiting them from buying up corn 
to sell at famine prices in times of dearth, broke 
undoubtedly the violence of these visitations, 
but they did not come without forcing many to 
suffer. 

These details will help us to form a good 
working conception of the conditions of busi- 
ness life led by Shakespeare's father, and by 
the majority of the poet's contemporaries and 
fellow-townsmen. We can picture John Shake- 
speare of a morning wrapping his gown about 
him, and chasing the pigs out of his path, 
as he hurries past the market -cross down 
High Street, when the clock strikes nine, on 
his way to a meeting of the town council 
in the guildhall or council chamber. We 
can watch him on a market day purchasing 
pewter ware in Wood Street or salt in Rother 
Market, and at the fair driving a brisk trade 
on his own account in wool, corn, and gloves. 
Now and then, by means of tallies, he reckons 
up his gains and losses and laments the slack- 
ness of trade and the perversity of debtors 
and creditors. He takes an intelligent in- 

180 



FAMINES 

terest in his garden and orchard, and sees 
the apples stored in autumn. He visits his 
namesake in Bridge Street when he is in 
need of boots, and is sympathetic with Richard 
Sponer, the painter, of Chapel Lane, who has 
been persecuted by the town bully, William 
Bott. Every night in winter he carefully 
hangs a lamp out before his house, and before 
nine o'clock he and his household are at rest. 
Sometimes he is summoned later by cries of 
fire, and has to work his two buckets in behalf 
of a neighbour's barn or house. He cannot write 
nor read, but he may have had a distant respect 
for book-learning. According to a recently re- 
covered piece of contemporary gossip, he was 
a ' merry-cheeked ' man, and a lover of a jest, 
reckoning himself a match in repartee for his 
divinely inspired son, whom he is said to have 
described as ' a good honest fellow.' ^ But nothing 
that he is known to have said or done, amid 
his serious and prosaic avocations, or amid such 
merry recreations as may be placed to his 
credit, seems likely to invest his children with 
anything akin to the genius of poetry. Never- 

^ See article by the writer on the 'Future of Shakespearean 
Research ' in The Nineteenth Century and After, for May 1900. 

181 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

theless, while he is still striving cheerfully, 
although with declining success, to make a 
living out of the wool and gloves that he keeps 
stored in his house in Henley Street, it is his 
eldest son who becomes the brightest of all 
lights in the firmament of English poetry. 



182 



XVI 

DOMESTIC AND SCHOOL DISCIPLINE 

A STRICT discipline, similar in principle to 
that enforced by the town council upon the 
burgesses, was maintained by the sober citizens 
within their own dwellings over their servants 
and children. From his earliest infancy we 
can roughly trace the stern habits of life in 
which attempts were made to train William 
Shakespeare. The ' Books of Nurture ' fre- 
quently published in the sixteenth century 
illustrate the manners which the middle-class 
father strove to impress upon his sons. The 
boy was to rise at six o'clock in the morning, 
carefully to attend to the more necessary 
portions of his toilet, and to brush his clothes. 
At meals he had to lay the table and wait 
on his parents, in whose presence he was not 
to talk or laugh but in moderation. After his 

183 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

parents rose from the table, he might say his 
grace and take his own meal. His modes of 
eating and drinking were carefully regulated. 
In the streets he had to take off his cap to 
his elders. He was to go to bed early, and 
say prayers morning and evening. The father 
was not to be sparing in the use of the rod. 

John Shakespeare and his wife Mary Arden, 
who was related to a good county family, 
and, perhaps, was herself well educated, were 
evidently determined to give their eldest son 
as good an education as Stratford afforded. 
Doubtless the clerk of the town, like the clerk 
of Chatham in 2 Henry VI., who is detected 
by Cade's followers ' setting of boys' copies,' 
was capable of teaching the boys the horn- 
book — such writing and reading as enabled 
them to gain admission to the grammar 
school. It was probably about 1571 that 
William proceeded for the first time to the 
schoolhouse. 

The dissolution of the Stratford guild did 
not involve, as we have seen, the dissolution 
of the old school of the guild. On the margin 
of the report made by the King's Com- 
missioners in 1548 a royal officer wrote, 

184 




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2 J 

a 

pi 

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S 2 



DISCIPLINE 

*Continuetur schola quousque,' and the school 
entered soon afterwards on a new lease of life. 
In June 1553 it was created by royal charter 
* The King's New School of Stratford-upon- 
Avon ' — 'a certain free grammar school, to 
consist of one master and teacher, hereafter 
for ever to endure.' The schoolmaster was 
to be appointed by the Earl of Warwick, to 
whom the manor and borough had been 
granted when the Bishop of Worcester's claim 
was ignored, and he was to receive twenty 
pounds a year, which was to be defrayed out of 
' a gift of certain lands to the value yearly of 
xlviZ^. iijs. ijd. ob. [£46, 3s, 2d'],'' made by 
the king to the burgesses. This ' school 
at Stratford,' we learn from Strype, ' was the 
last this prince founded.' The endowment 
is not yet exhausted, although the corporation, 
after the duke's execution, took to itself the 
government of the school ; and the boys of 
Stratford still enjoy the advantages of Edward 
vi.'s foundation. The schoolhouse stood, as 
it stands to-day with slight alteration, under 
the shadow of the guild chapel, forming part 
of the buildings of the old guild in Church 
Street. The schoolrooms were reached from 

187 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

an inner yard by an external staircase ' roofed 
with tile,' which was demolished about fifty 
years ago. Above them was a ' soller ' 
— a still higher story or garret — which was 
taken down in 1568. The fabric of the house, 
which had seen service in the days of the 
ancient guild, was old and in need of repair 
in Shakespeare's boyhood ; and in 1568 it 
underwent several amendments. A few years 
later the rooms became uninhabitable and 
underwent further renovation. While they 
were under repair the master had to take his 
pupils into the chapel itself. This was pro- 
bably no uncommon practice. Shakespeare 
likened Malvolio to ' a pedant that keeps 
school i' the church.' But in 1595 the holding of 
school in church or chapel was forbidden for 
the future. 

To this school the children of the Stratford 
freemen were sent, with rare exceptions. It 
was one of those ' common schools ' that 
received, according to a contemporary account, 
* all sorts of children to be taught, be their 
parents never so poor and the boys never so 
unapt.' And from Henley Street, some three 
hundred yards away, came each morning, from 

188 



DISCIPLINE 

1571 onwards, William, the seven-year-old son 
of John Shakespeare. His description penned 
thirty years later of 

The whining sch6olboy, with his satchel, 
And shining morning face, creeping like snail 
Unwillingly to school, 

is doubtless a reminiscence of this daily walk. 

The education supplied at a free day-school in 
Elizabethan England depended largely on the 
attainments of the schoolmaster, and these varied 
very much in quality with times and places. 
According to many contemporary writers, bad 
schoolmasters prevailed. ' It is a general plague 
and complaint of the whole land,' writes Pea- 
cham in the seventeenth century, 'for, for one 
discreet and able teacher, you shall find twenty 
ignorant and careless ; who (among so many 
fertile and delicate wits as England aifordeth), 
whereas they make one scholar, they mar 
ten ' ; and Roger Ascham had written some years 
before in the same strain. In many towns the 
office of schoolmaster was conferred on 'an 
ancient citizen of no great learning.' Some- 
times a quack conjuring doctor, like Pinch, of 
the Comedy of Errors, held the post. An 
eccentric master of St. Alban's School in 
u 189 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

the middle of the sixteenth century paid so 
much deference to the parents of his pupils, 
that ' by no entreaty would [he] teach any 
scholar he had further than his father had 
learned before them.' He argued that they 
would then prove saucy rogues and control their 
fathers. From the comparatively small number 
of burgesses at Stratford who could sign their 
names in the middle of the sixteenth century, we 
may infer that William Dalam, the last master 
appointed by the ancient guild, was no very 
zealous or capable performer of the duties of the 
office. But the far smaller average of marks- 
men in subsequent years proves that Dalam's 
successors were fairly discreet and able peda- 
gogues. The burgesses seem to have carefully 
selected them, and to have taken them on trial 
for two years at a time, and Walter Roche, 
appointed in 1570, Thomas Hunt in 1577, and 
Thomas Jenkins in 1580, apparently satisfied 
all the burgesses' requirements. 

The scholiasts have waxed warm in contro- 
versy over the educational equipment bestowed 
on the poet at Stratford; and while one has 
denied him the veriest elementary knowledge of 
the classics, another has credited him with the 

190 



DISCIPLINE 

acquirements of a Bentley or a Porson. There 
is every reason to believe that Masters Roche 
and Hunt gave young Shakespeare and his 
schoolfellows a firm grasp of Latin at least, and 
led them from the accidence and Lilly's grammar 
through conversation books and colloquies, like 
the Sententice Pueriles, up to Horace, Seneca, 
and Plautus, and *the rest of the finest Latin 
poets,' of whom conscientious masters were 
advised by contemporary writers on education 
to give their pupils a taste. It is just possible 
that at the most efficient country schools the 
more advanced scholars, before the patronage of 
some neighbouring magnate or the bestowal of 
a college scholarship enabled them to proceed 
to the universities, learnt something of the 
Greek grammar, with the Greek Testament, and 
Isocrates or Demosthenes. But Shakespeare 
was doubtless withdrawn from school, in con- 
sequence of his father's pecuniary misfortunes, 
before he enjoyed these advantages. 

In the pedantic Holof ernes of Loves Labour's 
Lost, Shakespeare has carefully portrayed the 
best type of the rural schoolmaster, as in Pinch he 
has portrayed the worst, and the freshness and 
fulness of detail imparted to the former portrait 

191 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

may easily lead to the conclusion that its 
author was drawing upon his own experience. 
Holofernes does not long appear on the stage 
before he pompously quotes from Lilly's gram- 
mar : ' Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur.' Other of 
Holofernes's phrases illustrate the practice in 
vogue of inviting boys to supply English syno- 
nyms to Latin words proposed by the master. 
His words, ' sanguis^ blood, . . . coelum, the sky, 
the welkin, the heaven, . . . terra, the soil, the 
land, the earth,' are veritable extracts from 
phrase-books like the Sententice Pueriles, which 
lads had to learn by heart. The formal dialogue 
in which Holofernes and his friend the curate, 
Sir Nathaniel, engage — 

Hoi. Novi hominem tanquam te : anne intelligis ? 
Nath. Laus Deo, bene intelligo. 
Nath. Videsne quis venit ? 
Hoi, Video et gaudeo, 

is framed on models to be met with in many 
popular Elizabethan school-books of familiar 
dialogues. And Shakespeare elsewhere proves 
his intimacy with the dialogue in such volumes 
specially marked for use in a school, when he 
makes Holofernes allude to their common 
phrases — 

192 



DISCIPLINE 

He speaks false Latin. Dirtiiiuiit Prisciani caput. 
It is barbarous Latin, Olet harhariem — 

in the criticism of Sir Nathaniel's Latin as 
* Priscian a little scratched,' and in the remark, 
' I smell false Latin,' on the country clown's 
burlesque misreading of 'ad dunghill' for 'ad 
unguem.' The pedagogue's citation of a line 
and a half from 'the good old Mantuan' (the 
mediaeval poet Mantuanus, whose eclogues, 
often preferred to Virgil's in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, formed the chief study of the fourth form 
in many grammar schools), his attempts to re- 
call his Horace, his praises of Ovid as the 
writer whose works were to be studied by Latin 
verse-makers, may all fairly be interpreted as 
memories of the instruction given at Stratford. 

It was usual for a boy to remain at the 
grammar school for seven years at least, from 
the age of seven to that of fourteen, and unless 
the master was singularly incapable, and the 
boys singularly rebellious, it was seldom that a 
young Elizabethan failed to acquire some useful 
knowledge in his schooldays. He rarely left 
school without being able to 'write and read 
English and congrue Latin.' But schoolboy 
morality was not very high, and by the practice 

193 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

of little frauds it was possible, we learn from 
contemporary sources, for idle pupils to make 
'shift to escape correction' without making any 
progress at the schoolhouse. An ingenious 
device of 'prompting' one another was prac- 
tised by boys, born in the same year as young 
Shakespeare, at Gloucester Grammar School : a 
few pupils would prepare the lesson given them 
overnight, and 'being at the elbows' of their 
idle companions, would put into their mouths 
answers to their master's question as he walked 
up and down by them. One of the boys named 
Willis has amusingly recounted his own experi- 
ence of this system. After pursuing it for a 
long while with complete success, ' it fell out 
on a day that one of the eldest scholars and 
one of the highest form fell out with me upon 
occasion of some boys' play abroad,' and all 
help from the prompters was denied him. His 
companions looked forward to seeing him ' fall 
under the rod,' but he gathered all his wits 
together, began to study for himself, and 'so 
the evil intended to me by my fellow-scholar, 
turned to my great good.' Small frauds of this 
kind were encouraged by the severity of the 
discipline adopted in all the rural schools. 

194 




< ^ 

OS o 



DISCIPLINE 

The birch was in continual request, and was 
administered with alarming brutality. Roger 
Ascham has described how recklessly floggings 
were awarded at Eton, and in the smaller 
schools the masters were under less intelligent 
supervision. A repulsive picture of the terrors 
which the schoolhouse had for a nervous child 
is drawn in a * pretie and merry new interlude,' 
entitled 'The Disobedient Child, compiled by 
Thomas Ingelend, late student in Cambridge,' 
about 1560. A boy who implores his father not 
to force him to go to school tells of his com- 
panions' sufferings there — how 

Their tender bodies both night and day 

Are whipped and scourged, and beat like a stone, 

That from top to toe the skin is away ; 

and a story is repeated of how a scholar was 
tormented to death by 'his bloody master.' 
Other accounts show that the playwright has 
not gone far beyond the fact. Peacham de- 
scribes a schoolmaster with whom he was 
acquainted, 'who in winter would ordinarily, 
on a cold morning, whip his boys even for no 
other purpose than to get himself a heat.' 
Nevertheless, we believe that Masters Roche 
and Hunt were of a milder disposition. Holo- 

197 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

femes, although of a dry humour, seems well 
disposed towards his pupils, and is invited in 
the play to dine with the father of one of them. 
Sir Hugh Evans asks his pupil, William Page, 
'some questions in his accidence,' when he 
meets him and his mother on a school holiday, 
with a geniality that makes it probable that 
his creator knew many of his profession who 
wielded the rod with discrimination. 



198 



XVII 

THE OCCUPATIONS OF STRATFORD LADS 

A FEW lads on leaving school passed on to the 
universities, or inns of court, to proceed in the 
study of the common law, divinity, or physic. 
Rich parents were usually anxious to give 
their children an opportunity of pursuing an 
academic career. At both Oxford and Cam- 
bridge charitable endowments maintained at 
the same time a large number of poor scholars. 
Sir Hugh Clopton had, as we have seen, left 
money for such a purpose. Of the poor univer- 
sity scholars, the majority entered the Church, 
and a great number of them gained high pre- 
ferment there. Their wealthier companions 
usually sought their fortunes at the bar, or 
after living riotously in London, often swelled 
the band of military adventurers by sea and 
land. 

X 199 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

But the larger proportion of the boys of a 
rural grammar school looked forward to earn- 
ing a livelihood by trade in their native town. 
And it was not an infrequent objection urged 
by practical men against the seven or eight 
years spent by the lads at school, that the time 
might have been better occupied in teaching 
them 'a mystery or occupation.' When a 
boy's schooldays were over, it was usual for 
his father to apprentice him to himself if an 
eldest son, or to a neighbour if a younger one, 
and seven years were consumed in the process 
of learning a trade. The restrictions on trad- 
ing at the time rendered this step incumbent 
on any parent who valued his son's future 
prosperity. No man who had not undergone 
a legally recognised apprenticeship was per- 
mitted by the municipal laws to open a shop 
or practise any craft within the borough, or 
to exercise any of the rights of a freeman. 
'No person,' ran an order issued by the bur- 
gesses of Stratford on 13th April 1603, 'shall 
set up, occupy, or exercise any trade, mystery, 
or occupation before he be made free or con- 
firmed in his freedom of the same trade where- 
unto he was apprentice.' In all towns the 

200 



OCCUPATIONS OF LADS 

apprentices formed the least orderly portion of 
the population, and the regulations enforced 
against them at Stratford — that they were to 
be at home before nine o'clock at night, that 
they were never to wear swords, and that they 
were not to tipple at the alehouses — prove that 
the older burgesses had some experience of 
their irregularities. Many of them spent three 
days and three nights in the stocks for breaches 
of the municipal by-laws. 

Whether or no Shakespeare on quitting 
school became an ordinary apprentice (' he 
was formerly in this town,' wrote Aubrey, 
'bound apprentice to a butcher,' i.e. apprentice 
to his father), there can be little doubt that 
the apprentices whom he had known at school 
were his intimate companions in early man- 
hood. The tradition recorded by Aubrey dis- 
tinctly states that * there was at that time 
another butcher's son in this town, that was 
held not at all inferior to him for a natural 
wit, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died 
young.' 

In September 1585, when the Earl of Lei- 
cester sent letters to his friends round Kenil- 
worth to enlist 500 men for the army which 

201 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

he was leading to the Low Countries, some 
adventurous ne'er-do-weels of Stratford doubt- 
less shouldered a pike beneath their great 
neighbour's standard. Stratford names like 
Combe and Arden certainly figure in the 
muster-lists of Leicester's battalions. 

Shakespeare's intimate knowledge of the 
technicalities of warfare has led one writer 
to the inference that Shakespeare himself 
marched with his young townsmen under 
Leicester's banner. A vain attempt has in- 
deed been made to identify him with 'Will, 
my Lord of Leicester's jesting player,' who 
(we know on the authority of Sir Philip 
Sidney) accompanied Leicester to Holland. 

Some of Shakespeare's schoolfellows found 
more peaceful occupation in the great houses 
of the country gentlemen in the neighbourhood 
of Stratford. It was their custom to keep a 
large retinue of serving-men — ' comely men, and 
commonly sons of honest yeomen or farmers of 
the country ' — who led a lazy life in the manor- 
houses, wearing good garments or liveries, aid- 
ing in their master's sports, and attending him 
at his meals. They were skilled, as a rule, in 
wrestling, leaping, running, and dancing ; they 

202 



OCCUPATIONS OF LADS 

could shoot with the long-bow or cross-bow, 
handle guns well, and entertain their masters 
with table-talk about hawks, hounds, fishing, 
and agriculture. Their profession brought 
them in some forty pounds a year, besides a 
good livery with a badge upon it, and in their 
master's absence they were wont to entertain 
their own guests in his hall. The menial 
servants — the bakers, brewers, chamberlains, 
wardrobers, falconers, hunters, horse-keepers, 
lackeys, fools, cooks, scullions, hog-herds, and 
the like — were far below them in social status. 
Shakespeare introduces serving-men on the 
stage as the confidants of their masters in 
the persons of Tranio and Balthasar; and 
Malvolio, Olivia's steward, was of their class. 
The author of an interesting tract, entitled 
* The English Courtier and Country Gentle- 
man ' (1586), which deals largely with ' the 
superfluity of serving-men' kept in country 
houses, designates them as so much unprofit- 
able furniture, and points out how they were 
proud and ill-natured, and wasted their master's 
substance. 

Of the houses near Stratford into which 
young townsmen were received, the nearest 

203 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

was doubtless Clopton House. At Charlecote 
Sir Thomas Lucy, at Milcote Sir Edward Gre- 
ville, and at Long Compton Lord Compton 
maintained large establishments ; while at no 
great distance was the castle of Kenilworth, 
in the occupation, for the greater part of 
Elizabeth's reign, of the Earl of Leicester. At 
these great buildings Shakespeare in all proba- 
bility frequently visited schoolfellows who had 
secured places in their owners' retinues. 

But there were young Stratford men who 
had higher aspirations than life in the town 
itself or in the immediate neighbourhood could 
satisfy. Life in London, then as now, was the 
goal of much youthful ambition, and thither 
occasionally youths from Stratford made their 
way to seek fame or fortune, or both. John 
Sadler was one of these in Shakespeare's time, 
and an account of his early life is interesting. 
On quitting Stratford he ' joined himself to the 
carrier, and came to London where he had 
never been before, and sold his horse in Smith- 
field ; and having no acquaintance in London 
to recommend him or assist him, he went from 
street to street, and house to house, asking if 
they wanted an apprentice, and though he met 

204 




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OCCUPATIONS OF LADS 

with many discouraging scorns and a thousand 
denials, he went on till he lighted on Mr. 
Brokesbank, a grocer in Bucklersbury, who, 
though he long denied him for want of sureties 
for his fidelity, and because the money he had 
(but ten pounds) was so disproportionate to 
what he used to receive with apprentices, yet, 
upon his discreet account he gave of himself 
and the motives which put him upon that 
course, and promise to compensate with dili- 
gent and faithful service whatever else was 
short of his expectation, he ventured to receive 
him upon trial, in which he so well approved 
himself that he accepted him into his service, to 
which he bound him for eight years.' 

The printing trade of London was growing 
rapidly, and it drew into its service no less 
than four of Shakespeare's companions at the 
Stratford-on-Avon Grammar School. The chief 
of these was Richard Field, son of that Henry 
Field, tanner, of whose property an inventory 
was made by his friend, John Shakespeare, in 
1592. Richard Field, who was baptized in Strat- 
ford-on-Avon church on 16th November 1561, 
was apprenticed to a printer in London in 
1579, and in 1587 set up in business for himself. 

205 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

In 1592 a younger brother, Jasper, who was 
baptized at Stratford on 24:th August 1577, 
became his apprentice. It is of importance to 
note that in 1593 Richard Field printed his 
fellow-townsman's * Venus and Adonis,' and 
next year his 'Rape of Lucrece.' Two other 
Stratford boys, who at like dates began life as 
apprentices of London printers, were Roger, 
son of John Lock, glover (who was bound to 
William Pickering in 1577), and Allan, son of 
Thomas Orrian Failer (who was bound to 
Thomas Fowkes in 1585). 

There is a current tradition that certain 
actors who acquired Elizabethan fame were 
natives of Stratford, and sought admission to 
a company of players on its visit to the town 
during a provincial tour. Thomas Greene and 
the two Burbages, James and Richard, have 
been claimed by the borough's historians as 
Shakespeare's fellow-townsmen; but in these 
three cases the full evidence has confuted the 
allegation. Nevertheless, it is certain that 
Stratford was visited with sufficient frequency 
by the London actors to induce some young 
men there, who were weary of their long 
apprenticeships to look in the direction of the 

206 



OCCUPATIONS OF LADS 

drama for relief from uncongenial occupations. 
Of these young men William Shakespeare was 
probably one. Of his mode of life between 
1578 and 1585, it may be stated as fairly certain 
that his father, during that period, endeavoured 
to secure his services in rehabilitating his 
decaying trade ; that William took unkindly to 
the pursuit of woolstapling in all its manifold 
branches; that he believed himself capable of 
making his way as actor and playwright; and 
that he set out for London to try his fortune in 
these professions. 



207 



XVIII 

THE PLAYERS AT STRATFORD 

If John Shakespeare ever regretted — as many 
a sober citizen of the day might have done — 
his son's choice of this primrose path, he had 
only himself to blame. Like all his friends of 
the town council, he was undoubtedly a lover 
of plays. While he was bailiff in 1568-69, he 
granted licences to play in the town to the 
Queen's players and the Earl of Worcester's 
players, two of the chief companies. Nine 
times between 1573 and 1581 did these or other 
companies enter the town with drum and 
trumpet, wearing their noble masters' badges, 
and give their performances in the guildhall. 
Very few of the town chamberlains down to 
the close of the century failed to enter in their 
annual accounts an item varying very capri- 
ciously from nine pounds to twelvepence paid 

208 



THE PLAYERS AT STRATFOED 

for dramatic entertainments at the fair time 
in September. In 1597 payments were made 
to four companies. Every manner of show 
could, in fact, reckon on a good reception in 
Stratford ; and in 1597 the bailiff sent three 
shillings and fourpence to a man bringing to 
the town his puppet show of the city of 
Norwich, a famous show to which the drama- 
tists often made allusion. 

Shakespeare as a child undoubtedly witnessed 
such performances ; and the circumstantial 
account given by a Gloucester contemporary 
named Willis — born in the same year as the 
poet — of his father's practice of taking him to 
the play, may well apply to William Shake- 
speare. The plays Willis witnessed were 
interludes — brief moralities with the faintest 
semblance of a plot about them. When the 
players came to a town, he tells us, they first 
waited on the mayor or bailiff to inform him 
'what nobleman's servants they were, and so 
get license for their public playing.' If the 
mayor liked the players, or wished to show 
their master respect, he would invite them to 
play for their first performance in the guild- 
hall before himself and the aldermen. 'That 

209 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

is called the mayor's play, when every one 
that will conies in without money, the mayor 
giving the players as he thinks to show re- 
spect unto them.' Afterwards they would 
perform in the courtyard of an inn, as at the 
Swan, Bear, or Crown, in Bridge Street, 
Stratford, and charge for admission. Willis, 
according to his own account, witnessed the 
mayor's play, standing between his father's 
legs, ' while he sat upon one of the benches, 
and where he saw and heard very well.' The 
interlude performed was the ' Cradle of 
Security,' in which the chief characters were 
the Wicked of the World, Pride, Covetousness, 
Luxury, the End of the World, and the Last 
Judgment. ' The sight,' Willis adds, ' took such 
impression on me that when I came to man's 
estate, it was as fresh in my memory as if I 
had seen it newly acted.' It is quite possible, 
moreover, that John Shakespeare occasionally 
took his son over to Coventry to witness 
the famous miracles or mysteries on Corpus 
Christi Day — the Thursday after Trinity 
Sunday. 

The Stratford townsfolk had from an early 
period been wont to witness these perform- 

210 



THE PLAYERS AT STRATFORD 

ances. In The Hundred Merry Tales, first 
issued in 1526, a popular jest - book of the 
sixteenth century, whence Beatrice taunts 
Benedick with having borrowed his wit, there 
is the story of a Warwickshire village priest, 
who concluded a sermon on the twelve articles 
of the creed with the words, 'If you believe 
not me, then for a more surety and suffi- 
cient authority, go your way to Coventry, 
and there ye shall see them all played in 
Corpus Christi play.' There Shakespeare, 
in all probability, learned how a grotesquely- 
painted canvas face, through whose open mouth 
a fire was visible, satisfactorily represented 
hell in the popular view. There he doubtless 
made the acquaintance of the sooty -faced 
figures that stood for lost souls, of Herod in 
his many - coloured dress and flaming sword, 
and of the devil and his tormentor the Vice. 
That the poet knew these features of the 
mysteries and something of their machinery 
is clear from such references as Falstaff's 
comparison of the flea on Bardolph's nose to 
'a black soul burning in hell,' or Hamlet's 
advice to the players to avoid inexplicable 
dumb-shows and noise that outherods Herod, 

211 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

or the Clown's description in Twelfth Night of 
the ' old Vice,' 

Who with dagger of lath 
In his rage and his wrath, 
Cries, ah, ha ! to the devil. 

It may be that among the Stratford people 
themselves, as in other towns and villages, 
pageants of rudimentary dramatic interest 
were played by the 'bachelry' at Christmas 
or Whitsuntide. In Loves Labour's Lost the 
show of the * Nine Worthies,' presented by the 
schoolmaster and his companions, has all the 
features of a rural Christmas comedy, and the 
'Pyramus and Thisbe' of Midsummer Night's 
Dream is constructed and presented by 'hard- 
handed men,' 

Which never laboured in their minds till now 
And now have toiled their unbreathed memories 
With this same play. 

A similar entertainment is described by Julia 
in the Tioo Gentlemen of Verona, another of 
Shakespeare's earliest comedies, when she, dis- 
guised as a page, is enlisting Sylvia's sympathy 
in her own behalf. ' At Pentecost,' she says. 

When all our pageants of delight were play'd, 
Our youth got me to play the woman's part, 

212 



THE PLAYERS AT STRATFORD 

And I was trimm'd in madam J ulia's gown ; 
Which served me as fit, by all men's judgments, 
As if the garment had been made for me : . . . 
For I did play a lamentable part : 
Madam, 'twas Ariadne, passioning 
For Theseus' perjury, and unjust flight. 

Pageants and interludes were played at 
intervals at the neighbouring great country- 
houses, where, as in the Taming of the Shreio 
and Hamlet, strolling companies often offered 
their services; and there is reason to believe 
that Shakespeare's father took him when eleven 
years old to Kenilworth, to witness the elaborate 
performances arranged to honour the Queen's 
visit there to Lord Leicester in 1575. Every 
step that Elizabeth took on this occasion 
was celebrated by some quaint semi-dramatic 
device. As she first approached the castle on 
Saturday, the 9th of July, a sibyl met her, pro- 
phesying prosperity to her government. The 
porter who opened the gate to her was dis- 
guised as Hercules. When she passed a pond in 
the outer court, female figures personating water 
nymphs offered her welcome. Next day a display 
of fireworks took place. Monday was occupied 
in hunting, ingeniously diversified by a sylvan 
masque. In whatever direction the Queen 

213 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

rode in the neighbouring country during the 
ensuing week, the villagers arranged similar 
shows for her delight. Reminiscences of these 
pageants have been detected by the com- 
mentators on Midsumraer Night's Dream^ in 
Oberon's famous description of the whereabouts 
of the little western flower, love-in-idleness. 



214 



XIX 



RURAL SPORTS 



Thus we may receive without much misgiving 
the theory that Shakespeare was encouraged 
while still a boy at Stratford to honour the 
drama ; and that it was in accordance with 
an early ambition that he sought employ- 
ment in 1585 at a London playhouse. But 
the drama was not the only amusement in 
which Shakespeare's plays prove him to have 
taken part ; there are many indications that, 
as a youth, he practised all manner of rural 
sports, and did not always escape censure in 
pursuit of them. Many of them he doubt- 
less engaged in far from Stratford, for he had 
many relatives among the farmers of the dis- 
trict, and they all encouraged young men in 
athletic exercises. His grandmother, Agnes 
Arden, was still living at Wilmcote and his 
z 215 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

father's brother, Henry, was still farming at 
Snitterfield. 

Rustic games for all ages and dispositions 
are mentioned in Shakespeare's plays. In 
his early comedies he refers to the 'whip- 
ping of tops,' ' hide and seek,' ' more sacks 
to the mill,' 'pushpin,' and 'nine men's morris.' 
The last, a game played on turf, seems to 
have resembled ' fox and geese,' now played 
with marbles on a wooden board. ' Nine-pins ' 
or ' ten-pins,' ' quoits,' ' hockey,' ' football,' ' leap- 
frog,' 'country base' or 'prisoners' base,' 'fast 
and loose,' and 'flap-dragon,' are also among 
the rural diversions of Elizabethan days to 
which Shakespeare makes allusion. Bowls 
formed a more solemn urban recreation, and 
the town council maintained a bowling alley 
for the free use of the townsmen, while they 
provided at the public expense at least one 
top for the boys. At Whitsuntide, or the 
beginning of May, there were village dances 
about the may-pole in which young and old 
took part, ' busied with a Whitsun morris- 
dance.' 

Even John Shakespeare, like the franklin 
described by Sir Thomas Overbury, doubt- 

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RURAL SPORTS 

less 'allowed of honest pastime, and thought 
not the bones of the dead anythmg bruised, 
or the worse for it, though the country lasses 
danced in the churchyard after evensong.' 
Probably, also, ' Rock-Monday, and the wake 
in summer, Shrovings, the wakeful catches on 
Christmas Eve, the hoky or seed-cake, these he 
yearly kept, yet held them no relics of Popery.' 
Rock-Monday followed Twelfth Day, and 
celebrated the resumption of the distaff or rock 
by the housewives after the twelve days' festivi- 
ties at Christmas time. Shrove Tuesday, when 
apprentices made holiday, was chiefly conse- 
crated to pancakes, cockfights, and cockthrowing. 
Hock-tide, the Monday and Tuesday after the 
second Sunday following Easter, was devoted 
to banquets and to sports, like wrestling, 
hurling, and shooting at the butts. At 
Coventry the Corpus Christi play was often 
repeated then, or one of rougher merriment 
performed. Harvest homes were also honoured 
with like celebration, and especially with 
* barley-break,' a game played by lads and 
lasses in the cornfields, which seems to have 
roughly resembled prisoners' base. Then it 
was that 

219 



STRATFORD ON- A VON 

Corin sat all day- 
Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love 
To amorous Phillida. 

Bear-batings occasionally diversified the amuse- 
ments of the countryside, and in morris-dancing 
the young people often indulged on ' the wanton 
green ' of a summer's evening. 

From an early date far-famed athletic meet- 
ings took place on the Cotswold Hills, at which 
Will Squele, a Cotswold man, according to 
Justice Shallow, was a ' swinge-buckler.' The 
Cotswold games were greatly improved by one 
Captain Dover, of Barton -on -the -Heath, not 
far from Stratford, early in James i.'s reign ; 
and coursing with greyhounds was pursued 
there. Shakespeare clearly knew these coursing 
matches well. He makes Slender ask John 
Page, * How does your fallow greyhound ? 
I heard say, he was outrun at Cotsale.' 

Of more elaborate country sports with which 
Shakespeare was clearly well acquainted, al- 
though he probably in early life witnessed 
them from afar, hunting and hawking hold the 
chief place. ' An' a man have not skill in the 
hawking and hunting languages, I '11 not give a 
rush for him,' says Master Stephen in Jonson's 

220 



RURAL SPORTS 

Every Mmi in his Humou7'\ and there is no 
lack of evidence that Shakespeare studied them 
both. He clearly had an ear for the music of 
the hounds, and often marked 

The musical confusion 
Of hounds and echo in conjunction. 

Theseus knows what hounds should be : — 

My hounds [he says] are bred out of the Spartan kind, 
So flew'd, so sanded : and their heads are hung 
With ears that sweep away the morning dew ; 
Crook-kneed, and dew-lapp'd like Thessalian bulls, 
Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bells, 
Each under each. A cry more tunable 
Was never hoUa'd to, nor cheer'd with horn. 

Near Stratford too, Shakespeare doubtless 
learnt the famous song of the hunt, to which 
he alludes in Ro7neo and Juliet : — 

The hunt is up, the hunt is up. 
Sing merrily we, the hunt is up : 

The birds they sing. 

The deer they fling, 

Hey ninny, ninny no. 

* The noble art of venery ' was often pursued 
in enclosed parks by the owners of the great 
houses, with trains of ladies, foresters, and other 
retainers. Deer was their chief quarry, and 
cross-bows seem to have then vied with hounds 

221 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

in bringing down the prey. It is this method of 
hunting that Shakespeare elaborately describes 
in Loves Labour's Lost, when the Princess and 
her ladies hunt the deer in the King of 
Navarre's Park. But the stag chase and the 
boar chase were pursued in the open country. 
It is over ' a poor sequester'd stag that from 
the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt,' that Jaques 
moralises in well-known lines. In his Venus 
and Adonis, Shakespeare especially recom- 
mends the hunting of the hare, the fox, and 
the roe ; and in another famous passage of this 
first poem he describes all the points of a 
hunter. It is very possible that Shakespeare 
in youth chased the timorous hare on foot. No 
more vivid picture of the pursuit of ' poor Wat ' 
is found in literature than in Shakespeare's 
Venus and Adonis. He shows us there the 
poor wretch * outrunning the wind,' ' cranking 
and crossing with a thousand doubles,' eluding 
the cunning hounds among a flock of sheep or 
herd of deer, or 'where earth-delving conies 
keep,' then far off upon a hill 'standing on 
hinder legs with listening ear ' — 

To hearken if his foes pursue him still ; 
Anon their loud alarums he doth hear ; 

222 



RURAL SPORTS 

And now his grief may be compared well 
To one sore sick, that hears the passing bell. 

Hawking — 'a princely delight,' as one con- 
temporary writer calls it, or 'a pleasure for 
high and mounting spirits,' according to another 
authority — was a more elaborate sport than 
hunting, and was invariably confined to the rich, 
although the country people delighted to watch 
its practice of a winter's morning, or to listen 
by night to the falconers' stories of their hawks' 
prowess. Similes and metaphors without num- 
ber has Shakespeare drawn from this recrea- 
tion, and his continual use of its technical terms, 
all of which are now obsolete, accounts for 
the obscurity of many passages in his plays. 
Hawks went by a variety of names, according 
to their age and training, and Shakespeare 
uses them all. There was the wild and in- 
corrigible haggard, to which Petruchio likens 
his shrew, Katharine : — 

Another way I have to man my haggard, 
To make her come, and know her keeper's call ; 
That is, — to watch her as we watch these kites. 
That bate, and beat, and will not be obedient. 

(To bate is to flutter the wings.) There was the 
eyas-musket, i.e. the hawk in its infancy, and 

223 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

the tassel-gentle, the mate of the gos-hawk, 
to both of which frequent allusion is made by 
the dramatist. Shakespeare knew how the 
hawks were unhooded and whistled off the 
fist, to which jesses and lures attached them, 
or how, when they were incapable of benefiting 
at the trainer's hands, they were let down the 
wind. Probably, too, Shakespeare was not 
unacquainted with less dignified sport in which 
birds were the prey. He talks of ' bat-fowling,' 
which is a Cotswold expression for taking birds 
by night in hand-nets, and of * setting springes 
for woodcocks.' 'The creeping fowler,' at a 
time when shooting birds was not a legiti- 
mate pastime, often succeeded, according to 
a passage in Midsuminer Night's Dream, in 
doing something more than scatter by his 
gun's report wild geese or russet-pated 
choughs. 

The Avon, with its 'wind'ring brooks, with 
their sedg'd crowns and ever harmless nooks,' 
must have also introduced the Elizabethan 
dwellers to some river sport. The river was 
not made navigable for even small boats till 
1635, and rowing as a recreation grew up at a 
much later date. But fishing has always had its 

224 



RURAL SPORTS 

English votaries. Few of the mediaeval monas- 
teries in this country lacked their anglers ; and 
the literature of the sixteenth century was 
graced by many tributes of no mean value to 
* an exercise so much laudable.' The incidental 
references that Shakespeare makes to the 
angler's art, the poetic fulness of his descrip- 
tions of the banks and ' fair course ' of rivers, 
and the distinctness with which he occasionally 
speaks of various freshwater fish, makes it 
almost certain that he himself, like others of 
his townsmen, had trolled for pike or luces, 
and tickled trout — for in those days fly-fishing 
was not — in the Warwickshire or Gloucester- 
shire streams. If the Avon then, as now, only 
harboured fish of the rank of dace and bream, 
pike and perch, the Elizabethan angler had but 
to make his way from Stratford to the streams 
that run from the Cotswolds into the Severn or 
the sources of the Thames, to enter a paradise 
where trout seldom failed him. Within a 
few miles of Stratford lived one of the most 
enthusiastic anglers of Shakespeare's time — a 
Gloucestershire squire named John Dennis, who 
gave voice to his passion in a long poem called 
the ' Secrets of Angling,' first published in 1613. 
2 a 225 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

In these verses the joys of the angler are ex- 
tolled above those of any other sportsman, and 
the author details the pleasures that he had 
experienced of seeing his ' quill and cork down 
sink, with eager bite of barbel, bleak, or dace.' 
If Shakespeare, who described how 

The pleasant'st angling is to see the fish 
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream, 
And greedily devour the treacherous bait, 

ever lived in his youth at Dursley, as many 
writers have urged, he surely helped Dennis to 
fish his waters, whether with or without his 
permission. He offers unmistakable reference 
to persons and places in the neighbourhood of 
Dursley in the second part of Henry IV., wherein 
he makes (Act v. sc. i.) Davy, the factotum of Shal- 
low, the Gloucestershire justice, ask his master 
* to countenance William Visor of Woncot against 
Clement Perkes of the Hill.' At Woodmancote, 
which is still pronounced Woncot, and is within 
an easy walking distance of Dursley, the family of 
Visor or Vizard has flourished since the sixteenth 
century. Overlooking Woodmancote is Stinch- 
combe Hill (still familiar to the natives as ' the 
Hill '), where in Shakespeare's day dwelt a family 
called Perkes. 

226 



XX 

CHARLECOTE HOUSE— POACHING IN THE PARK 

If tradition be admitted in evidence, the poet 
did not on occasion disdain to play the poacher. 
According to the ancient story, the whole course 
of his life was altered by his detection in 
the act of poaching at Charlecote Park. 
* The frolic of Shakespeare in deer-stealing 
was the cause of his Hegira,' says Landor, and 
although there is something to be urged 
against this statement, it probably has some 
foundation in fact. 

Tourists seldom leave Shakespeare's native 
place without traversing the four or five miles 
to the north-east which lie between it and the 
great park encircling Charlecote House.^ The 
winding River Avon skirts the enclosure to the 

1 This chapter is chiefly from two papers which I contributed 
to the Portfolio for May and July 1888. 

227 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

west. Large herds of deer are now always 
crouching under the branches of the old oaks and 
elms within its timber boundaries. The grey-red 
mansion where the Lucys have lived for more 
than three centuries stands at the water's edge ; 
avenues of limes approach it at back and front ; 
the flower-gardens which immediately surround 
it are separated from the gently undulating 
park by a sunken fence. The nineteenth century 
witnessed many additions to the building, but 
the Elizabethan portion has not been disfigured 
by restoration, and from one aspect still seems 
to the visitor to stand detached from the recent 
erections. Nowhere is a more finished specimen 
of Tudor domestic architecture to be met with. 

The building of the Elizabethan house at 
Charlecote was begun in 1558 — the year 
of Elizabeth's accession — and was probably 
finished in 1559. Its owner was Thomas 
Lucy. For more than five centuries his 
ancestors had owned the Charlecote Manor, 
which had figured in Domesday Book under 
the name of Ceorlecote. At first the lords 
of the manor took their surname from the place, 
but early in the thirteenth century William de 
Charlecote, who had fought with the Barons 

228 








o 




u 




w 


a 


ei 

^ 








X 


Pi 


u 


» 



CHARLECOTE HOUSE 

against King John, assumed, for reasons which 
antiquaries have not determined, the name 
of Lucy. A manor-house, with a chapel 
attached, was in existence at Charlecote 
throughout the Middle Ages, and its owners' 
prosperity grew, chiefly through intermarriages, 
with every generation. One Fulk de Lucy, 
who died in 1303, was 'a special lover of good 
horses,' and paid forty marks {i.e. £26, 13s. 4cZ.) 
for a black horse at a time when an ox cost 
sixteen shillings. Many of his descendants 
sat in Parliament as knights of the shire of 
Warwick, and nearly all of them, for military 
services rendered to the Crown at home or 
abroad, received the honour of knighthood. 
William Lucy became a Knight of the Bath 
when Henry vii.'s Queen Elizabeth was 
crowned at Westminster, and it was Sir 
William's grandson who built Charlecote as we 
know it. 

The young man had been carefully brought 
up. John Foxe, the compiler of the martyr- 
ology, had come from Oxford to be his tutor, 
and on 3rd February 1547 (it is of interest to 
note) Foxe, while holding that office, married 
at the little Charlecote church Agnes Randall, 

229 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

a lady of many virtues, who was, like himself, 
in the service of the Lucys. ^ Foxe's pupil was 
only twenty-six years old when he took the 
work of rebuilding Charlecote in hand, but six 
years earlier, in 1552, his father's death had 
made him master of his family's great War- 
wickshire estate, which soon included, besides 
Charlecote, the neighbouring properties of Sher- 
borne and Hampton Lucy, the former a grant 
of Edward vi. and the latter of Queen Mary 
in 1556. Meanwhile his wife, Joyce Acton, 
had brought him Sutton Park, at Tenbury, 
Worcestershire. His worldly position was in 
no wise inferior to that of a nobleman ; and 
he was wealthy enough to freely indulge the 
taste for elaborate architecture which charac- 
terised the aristocracy of his day. 

Of the pre -Elizabethan manor-house at 
Charlecote no trace remains. The Elizabethan 
mansion, reared probably on the old site, owes 
nothing to an earlier epoch. The ground-plan 
roughly resembles the letter E, an eccentric 
compliment which great builders of the day 
were fond of paying to the reigning sovereign. 
The original building, with its gently sloping 

1 See Art. 'Foxe, John,' in Dictionary of National Biograi^hy. 

230 




o S . 

c ::: 'J 

H H u 

5 s ^ 

:5 <^ =^ 

S CS! Cx] 

U fe H 



CHARLECOTE HOUSE 

gables, is flanked at either end by boldly 
projecting wings, with octagonal angle turrets. 
The fabric is of red brick ; the window 
dressings are of stone, but all has grown 
greyish with age. Near the centre of the 
facjade stands an elaborate porch, which 
supplies on the ground-plan the E's short 
middle stroke. There is a striking contrast be- 
tween this richly worked excrescence and the 
homely simplicity of the rest of the building. 
It has been suggested that it was by a different 
and more fashionable architect, who was ac- 
quainted with both the Italian and French 
Renaissance styles, and that it was added 
after the house was built. John of Padua, 
alias John Thorpe, the designer of Holland 
House and the greatest English architect of 
the time, is credited on uncertain grounds 
with this admirable specimen of Renaissance 
architecture. It is in two floors, each supported 
by pillars, and the whole surmounted by a 
delicately carved balustrade. The front is 
of freestone ; the lower pillars are of the 
Ionic order, the upper of the Composite. Over 
the doorway, on the ground story, the royal 
arms, with the letters * E.R' are engraved, 

231 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

and in the spandrils are the initial letters 
* T.L.', i.e. Thomas Lucy. 

But the porch is not the only remarkable fea- 
ture of the exterior of Charlecote. Before the 
house lies a quadrangular garden court enclosed 
by low terrace walls, protected from without by 
the sunken fence. On the side of the enclosure 
that is farthest from the house rises a massive 
structure two stories high, and completely 
isolated. Through its ground -floor runs a 
narrow archway, closed at the outward end 
by iron gates. This structure is the detached 
gatehouse, of which few examples remain 
in England. In earlier Tudor times large 
mansions were usually quadrangular in shape, 
like the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. 
In that case the gatehouse invariably sur- 
mounted the one archway by which the 
quadrangle could be entered. It was at 
times battlemented and fortified to resist 
attack, but more often architects lavished on 
it their most elaborate schemes of decoration. 
When the quadrangular form of building was 
dying out its memory occasionally survived in 
a forecourt fronted by an isolated building, 
exactly modelled after the older fashioned 

232 







CHARLECOTE 
PORCH. 



CHARLECOTE HOUSE 

gatehouse; but now that three sides of the 
quadrangle were absent, it stood, as here 
at Charlecote, at some fifty yards' distance 
from the mansion, looking like a stately 
lodge. 

In its architecture the gatehouse at Charle- 
cote exactly resembles the main building. 
Octagonal turrets adorn its four angles. Its 
roof is flat, and is surmounted by a balus- 
trade; oriel windows project on the second 
floor above both ends of the archway. In 
Elizabethan days the porter lived on the 
ground floor ; the upper formed a large ban- 
queting-room. As a defence against unwel- 
come intruders the gatehouse still had its uses, 
but great householders had long ceased to 
fear very formidable foes in Elizabeth's time ; 
and it was probably erected by Sir Thomas 
Lucy merely as an effective architectural 
ornament. 

Comparatively little within the house to- 
day recalls the sixteenth century. But in the 
library stand chairs, couch, and cabinet of 
coromandel wood, inlaid with ivory, which, 
tradition says, were presented by Queen Eliza- 
beth to Leicester in 1575, and were brought 
2b 235 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

here from Kenil worth in the seventeenth 
century.^ 

The modern bust of the poet in the hall re- 
calls the relationship which tradition has set 
up between Sir Thomas Lucy, its builder, and 
the dramatist in his youth. By 1586 or 1587, 
when the two men are alleged to have become 
acquainted, Thomas Lucy had grown in dignity. 
Six years after he had completed the rebuild- 
ing of his manor-house, he was knighted (in 
1565), and he subsequently sat in two parlia- 
ments (1571 and 1584) as knight of the shire 
of Warwick. In 1586 he was high sheriff of 
the neighbouring county of Worcestershire, in 
right of the property derived from his wife. 
The town of Stratf ord-on-Avon knew him well. 
As a local justice and commissioner of the 
musters for the county of Warwick, he fre- 
quently rode thither, and the Corporation liber- 
ally entertained him at the Bear or the Swan, 
the chief inns of the city. But these perform- 
ances never made a man famous. Had not 
tradition credited Sir Thomas Lucy with pre- 
serving deer in Charlecote Park, and accused 

1 An interesting account of Charlecote appears in Mr. W. 
Niven's privately printed Old Warwickshire Rouse (1878). 

286 



















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'6 



THE TERRACE 

FRONT, 

CllARLECOTE. 



CHARLECOTE HOUSE 

the poet Shakespeare of poaching on his pre- 
serves, there would have been no reason why 
his name should have escaped obscurity. It is 
stated that he entertained Queen Elizabeth on 
her way to the great entertainment provided 
for her at Kenilworth by Leicester in 1575. 
But it is impossible that the Queen could 
have slept there, for her authentic route is 
known, and does not include Charlecote as a 
resting-place at night. Some urge modestly 
that she breakfasted there, but this report lacks 
confirmation. 

In the seventeenth century it was currently 
reported in Stratford that Shakespeare as a 
youth fell into bad company, and 'made a 
frequent practice of deer-stealing . . . more 
than once . . . robbing a park that belonged 
to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Strat- 
ford.' On one occasion, according to the 
version recorded by Rowe, the earliest editor 
of the plays, he was arrested by Sir Thomas's 
keeper and severely punished, whereupon 'he 
made a ballad upon ' the owner of Charlecote, 
which was ' probably the first essay of his 
poetry.' Further persecution was threatened, 
and Shakespeare escaped to London to try 

237 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

his fortune on the stage. The independent 
testimony of Archdeacon Davies, who was 
vicar of Saperton, Gloucestershire, late in the 
seventeenth century, is to the effect that Shake- 
speare * was much given to all unluckiness in 
stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from 
Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipped, 
and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made 
him fly his native county to his great ad- 
vancement.' The soundest scholar among Shake- 
speare's biographers — Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps — 
accepts the outline of this story as incon- 
trovertible fact. The additional details that 
Queen Elizabeth intervened to protect Shake- 
speare from Sir Thomas's fury, and that 
the youth stole the buck to celebrate his 
wedding-day, are obvious fabrications. Nor 
can the rumour — perpetuated in a well- 
known picture — that Shakespeare when ar- 
rested by the keepers was brought before 
Sir Thomas in the hall of Charlecote be 
substantiated. 

It has been argued by disbelievers in the 
whole tradition that in the sixteenth century 
no deer-park existed at Charlecote. There 
was, however, a recognised warren at Charle- 

238 




"■n-;>W#:- 






CHARLECOTE 
GATEHOUSE. 



CHARLECOTE HOUSE 

cote, and in the view of the law the theft of 
rabbits from a statutable warren was as serious 
an offence as deer-stealing, and might easily 
have been confused with it. According to 
Coke, a warren might be inhabited by hares 
and roes as well as by rabbits, and Shakespeare 
might thus have sought his prey in Lucy's 
warren without seriously impugning the truth 
of the tradition. But although Charlecote 
in Shakespeare's youth cannot be proved to 
have been a statutable park — i.e. an enclosure 
' closed with wall, pale, or hedge,' and ' used 
for the keeping, breeding, and cherishing of 
deer' — Sir Thomas is known to have been 
an extensive game -preserver, and to have 
employed gamekeepers on many of his estates. 
In March 1585 he introduced a Bill into Parlia- 
ment for the better preservation of ' game and 
grain.' He did not, it is true, make many 
recorded gifts of venison; but a German 
traveller in Elizabeth's reign noted that 
fallow-deer of various colours were as com- 
monly met with in England in woods as in 
enclosed parks, and there seems no doubt that 
deer lived in Hampton Woods in the im- 
mediate neighbourhood of Charlecote. When, 

241 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

in the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas's suc- 
cessor acquired Fulbroke Park, which also lies 
on the boundaries of Charlecote, he is stated 
on good authority to have immediately stocked 
it with deer. And as early as 1602 the Lord 
Keeper, Egerton, received a buck from the 
Lucy estates, although its preserve is not dis- 
tinctly named. It is, therefore, difficult to deny 
that a few herds of deer might have roamed, 
as at present, about Charlecote House. The 
law of Shakespeare's day (5 Eliz. cap. 21) 
punished deer-stealers with three months' im- 
prisonment and the payment of thrice the 
amount of the damage done ; but the popular 
opinion was on the side of the poacher. ' Veni- 
son is nothing so sweet as when it is stolen,' 
was a contemporary proverb. The author of 
Titus Andronicus had more than a theoretic 
sympathy with the art of the poacher when he 
makes his youthful hero Demetrius ask the 
villain Aaron (ii. i. 93-4) : — 

What, hast not thou full often struck a doe, 
And borne her cleanly by the keeper's nose ? 

In 1828 Sir Walter Scott was informed by 
the owner of Charlecote that Shakespeare stole 

242 










■*<sX'"'''^'~ 



fik<i 






,<:^ 




~6' 






CHARLECOTE 
FROM THE 
GATEHOUSE. 



CHARLECOTE HOUSE 

the deer — not from Charlecote, but from Ful- 
broke Park. This version of the exploit was 
first promulgated about a century ago, and was 
very well received. The antiquary, Ireland, 
introduced into his Vieivs on the Waricick- 
shire Avon (1795) an engraving of an old 
farmhouse in the hamlet of Fulbroke, where, 
he asserted, Shakespeare was temporarily im- 
prisoned after his arrest. An adjoining hovel 
was also described for some years as Shake- 
speare's ' deer-barn ' ; but the site of these 
buildings (now removed) was not Sir Thomas 
Lucy's property in Elizabeth's reign, and the 
amended legend is a pure invention. 

The ballad which Shakespeare is reported to 
have fastened on the park-gates of Charlecote 
does not survive. An old man, who lived in 
a village near Stratford, and died in 1703 at the 
age of ninety, is stated to have repeated from 
memory the following lines, and they are often 
identified with the libel which irritated Sir 
Thomas Lucy : — 

A Parlianient member, a justice of peace, 
At home a poor scarecrowe, at London an asse ; 
If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it, 
Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befall it. 

243 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

He thinks himself greate, 

Yet an asse in his state, 

We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate, 
If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it, 
Then Lucy is lowsie whatever befall it. 

Attempts have been made to prove the 
genumeness of this worthless effusion. That 
it is some two hundred years old may be 
admitted; the author is undoubtedly correct 
in describing Lucy as 'a Parliament member 
and justice of peace,' which may be urged 
as proof that he was not unacquainted with 
Lucy's biography, but that the lines are three 
centuries old, and the work of Shakespeare, 
may be safely deoied. 

Shakespeare undoubtedly took a subtle re- 
venge. He immortalised Charlecote and its 
owner in the character of Justice Shallow. 
According to Davies, of Saperton, 'his re- 
venge was so great that he [i.e. Lucy] is his 
[i.e. Shakespeare's] Justice Clodpate, and [he] 
calls him a great man, and that, in allusion 
to his name, bore three louses rampant for 
his arms.' Justice Shallow came to birth in 
the second part of Shakespeare's Henry IV. 
(written about 1597). He is, as all the world 
knows, a garrulous old gentleman who is proud 

244 




THE 

PLESAUNCE, 

CHARLECOTE. 



CHARLECOTE HOUSE 

to call himself 'one of the King's justices 
of the peace,' and ostentatiously parades re- 
miniscences of his wild days. His house is 
in Gloucestershire, and in the court before 
it Falstaff reviews, with the aid of the owner 
acting as commissioner of the muster, his 
far-famed ragged regiment. His hospitality 
and his officiousness as justice and muster- 
man tally with all that is known of Lucy, 
but the identity of the two does not dis- 
tinctly appear until Shallow's entrance in 
the opening scene of the Merry Wives of 
Windsor (probably written early in 1598). 
There he has come from Gloucestershire to 
Windsor to 'make a Star-chamber matter' 
of a poaching affray on his estates. Falstaff 
is the offender. In a rambling and querulous 
conversation with his cousin Slender, Shallow 
refers with pride to his ancient lineage, and 
Slender corroborates him with an allusion to 
' the dozen white luces,' on his * old coat ' 
of arms. This is undoubtedly a blundering 
jest on the arms of the Charlecote Lucys, 
described by heralds as 'three luces hauriant 
argent.' A luce is in modern English a pike — 
a fact that accounts for Falstaff's comparison 
2c 245 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

elsewhere of Shallow to an 'old pike.' The 
three luceSi or pikes, are engraved on all the 
monuments to the Lucys in Charlecote Church, 
and on one monument a quartering of their 
arms appears with three fish in each of four 
divisions. Thus Slender may not be talking 
altogether at random when he speaks of the 
dozen luces. Shakespeare distinctly emphasises 
the reference to the Lucy arms. ' It is an old 
coat,' says Shallow, in reply to Slender. 'The 
dozen white louses do become an old coat well ' 
is Sir Hugh Evans's punning comment, and the 
dialogue lingers about the topic. Later in 
the scene, as soon as Falstaff enters, Shallow 
abruptly introduces the business which has 
brought him from Gloucestershire. 'Knight, 
you have beaten my men, killed my deer, 
and broke open my lodge!' is his charge; 
'But not kissed your keeper's daughter,' is 
Falstaff's humorous rejoinder. 

Shall. — Tut, a pinl this shall be answered, 

Fal. — I will answer it straight. I have done all this ; 
that is now answered, 

Shall. — The Council shall know this, 

Fal. — 'Twere better for you if it were known in counsel 
[i.e. if you took good counsel about it]; you'll be 
laughed at. 

246 




THE TURRET 

STAIRWAY, 

CHARLECOTE. 



CHAKLECOTE HOUSE 

And there the matter ends. Shallow and 
Lucy are in identical situations throughout. 
By many smaller details their identity could 
be illustrated. Lucy was an enthusiast for 
archery, according to an extant letter sent 
by him to Leicester ; so was Justice Shallow. 
The reiterated mention of Shallow's judicial 
functions suggests the repeated exercise of 
Sir Thomas Lucy's legal authority, which is 
vouched for by the Stratford-on-Avon Cor- 
poration archives. Justice Shallow is, bej^ond 
reasonable doubt, Shakespeare's satiric sketch 
of the builder of Charlecote.^ 

1 An admirably full and scholarly account of the Shakespearian 
traditions that have gathered about Charlecote is to be found in 
the seventh edition of Mr. J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines 
of the Life of Shakespeare, vol. i. pp. 67-76, 157-161; and vol. ii. 
pp. 379-390. 




ARMS OV LUCY. 



247 



XXI 

INDOOR AMUSEMENTS 

Of indoor amusements, few were probably in 
much vogue at Stratford. But cards seem to 
have been occasionally played. 

In foul weather [says Vincent, a country gentle- 
man, in the Dialogue with an English Courtier, 1586] 
we send for some honest neighbours, if haply we be 
with our wives alone at home (as seldom we are) and 
with them we play at Dice and Cards, sorting our- 
selves according to the number of players, and their 
skill, some to Ticktack, some Lurch, some to Irish 
game, or Doublets : others sit close to the Cards, at 
Post, and Pair, at Ruff or Colchester Trump, at 
Mack or Maw : yea, there are some ever so fresh 
gamesters, as will bear you company at Novem 
Quinque, at Faring, Tray trip, or one-and-thirty, 
for I warrant you, we have right good fellows in the 
country ; sometimes also (for shift of sports, you 
know, is delectable) we fall to Slide Thrift, to Penny 
prick, and in winter nights we use certain Christmas 

248 



INDOOR AMUSEMENTS 

games very proper, and of much agility ; we want 
not also pleasant mad-lieaded knaves that be pro- 
perly learned, and will read in diverse pleasant 
books and good Authors ; as Sir Guy of Warwick, 
the Four Sons of Aymon, the Ship of Fools, the 
Budget of Demands, the Hundred Merry Tales, the 
Book of Riddles, and manj^ other excellent writers 
both witty and pleasant. These pretty and pithy 
matters do sometimes recreate our minds, chiefly 
after long sitting and loss of money. 

• But many preferred to recreate themselves in 
an alehouse, and play there an elementary form 
of bagatelle called 'shovel-board.' The Strat- 
ford people still tell how Shakespeare often 
crossed from New Place to the Falcon Tavern, 
on the opposite side of Chapel Street, and 
played this game with his neighbours, at the 
very board now preserved in the house at New 
Place ; but, unluckily for the tradition, we know 
very well that the tavern sprang up at a later 
date, and in Shakespeare's day was a private 
dwelling-house in the occupation, early in the 
seventeenth century, of Mrs. Katharine Temple, 
and later of Joseph Boles, a friend of John Hall, 
the poet's son-in-law. 

There is another very persistent tradition at 
Stratford, to show that Shakespeare frequently 

249 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

took his ease in an inn. According to this 
story, Shakespeare engaged, as a youth, in a 
famous drinking-match at another tavern called 
the Falcon, at Bidford, some five or six miles 
from his native town. The tale dates, in its 
most authentic form, from no earlier year than 
1762. A gentleman visiting Stratford was then 
taken to Bidford, and shown ' in the hedge a 
crab-tree called Shakespeare's Canopy, because 
under it our poet slept one night ; for he, as 
well as Ben Jonson, loved a glass for the 
pleasure of society.' Shakespeare (the story 
proceeds), ' having heard much of the men of 
the village as deep drinkers and merry fellows, 
one day went over to Bidford to take a cup 
with them. He inquired of a shepherd for the 
Bidford drinkers, who replied that they were 
absent, but the sippers were at home, and, " I 
suppose," continued the sheep-keeper, "they 
will be sufficient for you " ; and so, indeed, they 
were ; — he was forced to take up his lodgings 
under that tree for some hours.' 

This story has since been elaborated by Strat- 
ford writers, who make Shakespeare ' extremely 
fond of drinking hearty draughts of English 
ale, and glorying in being thought a person of 

250 




^ ^ p'l'w 



.-'-'-•.TviW- J'^ 



Jt 



'"'■ ^v,\ ^ 




INDOOR AMUSEMENTS 

superior eminence in that profession,' and assert 
that, being worsted in a drinking contest with 
the junior drinking ckib of the Sippers at Bid- 
ford, he with his companions slept under a 
crab-tree for a whole night. Shakespeare and 
his companions were next day invited to renew 
the contest, but the poet wisely declined, saying, 
' I have drank with 

Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston, 
Haunted Hillborough, Hungry Grafton, 
Dadgeing Exhall, Papist Wixford, 
Beggarly Broom, and Drunken Bidford — 

meaning, by this doggrel, with the bibulous 
competitors who had arrived from the first- 
named seven villages, all of which are within a 
few miles of Bidford,' and thus not far from 
Stratford. The rhyme is very halting, and few 
of the villages are specially noted for the 
qualities indicated by the epithets. Bidford, 
although it now strives manfully to deserve the 
epithet bestowed on it in these lines, was re- 
puted in 1605 and 1606, to have its alehouses in 
good order and its rogues punished. In 1613, 
however, one John Darlingie was ' presented ' 
there for ' keeping ill rule in his house on the 
Sabbath in service time by selling of ale,' 

253 



STRATFOKD-ON-AVON 

and later in the century the alehouse-keepers 
were guilty of many irregularities. The room 
pointed out at Bidford as forming part of the 
Falcon Tavern where Shakespeare's match took 
place, and the antique chair at the Stratford 
birthplace stated to have belonged to the 
room are relics of highly doubtful authen- 
ticity. Other versions of the tale make the 
drunken band sleep under the crab-tree 'from 
Saturday night till the following Monday morn- 
ing, when they were roused by workmen going 
to their labour.' The crab-tree was standing 
in the beginning of the last century, but was 
removed in a decayed condition in 1824. 

A similar legend represents Shakespeare as a 
frequenter of another village inn at Wilmcote, 
his mother's birthplace. This house (we are 
told) ' was resorted to by Shakespeare for the 
sake of diverting himself with a fool who 
belonged to a neighbouring mill.' Wilmcote 
was colloquially called Wincot. Two other 
villages at no great distance from Stratford 
bore in popular parlance the same designa- 
tion, although only one of them was so spelt. 
Both were clearly resorts of Shakespeare. It was 
probably one or both of these ' Wincots ' rather 

254 



INDOOR AMUSEMENTS 

than Wilmcote that Shakespeare had in mind 
when he described the drunken exploits of Kit 
Sly in his Taming of the Shrew. Four miles 
from Stratford is the hamlet of Wincot, Tvhich 
alone of the three villages of similar name has 
no alternative spelling. It now consists of a 
single farm-house, which was at one time an 
Elizabethan mansion, and appears in Shake- 
speare's day to have been surrounded by an 
open heath, although the land has since been 
enclosed. This Wincot forms part of the 
parish of Quinton, and in the Quinton registers 
still stands an entry on 21st November 1591 of 
the baptism of ' Sara Hacket, the daughter of 
Robert Hacket.' Sara was probably of near kin 
to * Marian Hackett, the fat alewif e of Wincot ' 
who included Kit Sly among her customers. 

Yet by Warwickshire antiquaries the 'Wincot' 
of the Taming of the Shreiv was positively 
identified with Wilnecote (or Wincot, as it is in- 
variably called) near Tamworth, on the Stafford- 
shire border of Warwickshire, at some distance 
from Stratford. Wilnecote gained a repute for 
its ale, which excelled that of any place of the 
like designation. The Warwickshire poet, Sir 
Aston Cokain, addressing a poem in 1658 to 
2d 255 



STRATFOED-ON-AVON 

' Mr. Clement Fisher, of Wincott/ a well-known 
resident of Wilnecote, reminded liim how 

Shakespeare your Wincot ale hath much renownd, 
That foxd a beggar so (by chance was found 
Sleeping) that there needed not many a word 
To make him to believe he was a lord. 

The far-famed tinker, Kit Sly, was doubtless 
well known in the flesh at Stratford. Among his 
comrades in Shakespeare's play mention is made 
of Stephen Sly. A man of that precise name was 
a familiar figure in Stratford in Shakespeare's 
day, and seems at one time to have been a ser- 
vant of WilHam Combe at the College. Joan Sly, 
too, was fined in 1630 by the Stratford magis- 
trates for breaking the Sabbath by travelling. 

'Old John Naps of Greece, and Peter Turf 
and Henry Pimpernell,' whom Kit Sly also 
enumerates among his boon companions, were 
also, in all probability, reminiscences of Shake- 
speare's living acquaintances. ' Greece,' whence 
* old John Naps ' derived his cognomen, may well 
be a misreading of Greet, a hamlet by Winch- 
comb, in Gloucestershire, not far removed from 
Stratford. According to local tradition, Shake- 
speare was familiar with Greet, Winchcombe, 
and all the villages in their immediate neighbour- 

256 






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CHARLECOTE 

STABLES 

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INDOOR AMUSEMENTS 

hood. He is still credited with the authorship 
of the local jingle which enumerates the chief 
points of interest of the district : — 

Dirty Gretton, dingy Greet, 
Beggarly Winchcombe, Sudeley sweet, 
Hartshorn and Wittington Bell 
Andoversford and Merry Frog Mill. 

A quart of ale was a dish for a king 
all over England in Elizabethan days, and 
there is nothing more probable, although the 
proof may not be legally complete, than that 
Shakespeare indulged in alehouse festivities. 
The sober magistrates of Stratford did the 
same. They always celebrated the visits of 
neighbouring gentry at quarter sessions by 
deep potations. Whenever Sir Thomas Lucy 
visited Stratford, a pottle of wine and a quar- 
tern of sugar, or a quart of burnt sack and 
sugar, were placed at his disposal either at the 
Swan or the Bear, or at one of the aldermen's 
private houses. Sir Edward Greville, lord of 
the manor of Stratford after 1590, the moat of 
whose house at Milcote is still visible in the 
fields there, came very often to the town at 
the close of the sixteenth century to be enter- 
tained at a municipal banquet, and to quaff his 

259 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

quart of sack and gallon of claret. His more 
famous relative, the poet, Sir Fulk Greville, also 
came over from Beauchamp's Court by War- 
wick to take vrine, sugar, and cakes v^ith the 
magistrates. He or Sir Edward or Sir Thomas 
Lucy would send them a buck or doe to form 
the substance of their meal together, and would 
sometimes accept a sugar-loaf or a keg of 
sturgeon in lieu of wine. When the itinerant 
justices visited the town, or the muster of the 
trained bands of the district was held there, the 
town council was not sparing in its supply of sack 
and claret or Rhenish liquor. At one of these 
entertainments sixteenpence was spent in wine 
and a penny in bread — a collocation of items 
which reminds one of the monstrous ' half- 
pennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of 
sack.' None the less, these aldermen and bur- 
gesses of Stratford were ready next morning to 
set a poor artificer in the stocks for three days 
and three nights, were he charged before them 
with wasting time in an alehouse. 



260 



XXII 

CHRISTENINGS AND MARRIAGES 

Other kinds of merrymaking celebrated the 
happy crises of domestic life. The christening 
of a child was a time of festival and gift-giving. 
Apostle-spoons were always bestowed on the 
infant among the middle classes, as silver and 
gold cups were bestowed among the upper. 
After baptism at the church font the child was 
wrapped in a chrisome, or white chrism-cloth ; 
and Dame Quickly refers to the practice when 
she compares Falstaff on his deathbed to 'any 
christom child.' Shakespeare must have often 
seen such ceremonies. His sister Joan, who 
afterwards married William Hart, of Stratford, 
was baptized when he was five years old ; his 
sister Anna, who died at the age of eight, when 
he was seven ; his brothers Richard ~and 
Edmund, when he was ten and sixteen respec- 

261 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

tively. His eldest daughter, Susanna, was 
baptized in the parish church, 26th May 1583, 
and his twin children, Hamnet and Judith, 
2nd February 1585. Nor does this exhaust the 
list of christenings which he attended. The 
nephew of Sir Roger Lestrange vouched for the 
story that Shakespeare was godfather to a son 
of Ben Jonson's, and gave him a dozen good 
latin {i.e. brass) spoons, for his father, as he 
said jestingly, to translate. 

But weddings formed the chief events in the 
domestic annals of Elizabethan merriment. 
There were first the espousals to be celebrated 
— the public announcement of betrothal. The 
clergyman directed this important ceremony 
in the house of the bride's parents, and it 
was often regarded in the country as equi- 
valent to a marriage. Shakespeare describes 
its details in Twelfth Night as 

A contract of eternal bond of love, 
Confirni'd by mutual joinder of your hands, 
Attested by the holy close of lips, 
Strengthen'd by interchangement of your rings : 

and sealed finally by the testimony of the priest. 
The lady usually received from her lover a bent 

262 



CHRISTENINGS AND MARRIAGES 

sixpence, or gloves, with handkerchiefs and 
fruit. The marriage ceremony followed at 
varying intervals. At the simplest weddings 
the bride was led to church in her best gown, 
with her hair hanging down her back, by boys 
' with bride laces and rosemary tied about their 
silken sleeves.' A bride cup filled with wine 
and decorated with rosemary and silk ribbons 
was borne before her. Musicians and girls 
followed her, one of whom carried the bridal 
cake. The bridal cup appears, from the account 
of Petruchio's wedding in the Taming of the 
Shrew, to have been drunk in the church. 

A full account of a Warwickshire ' bride-ale,' 
as the wedding was called, is given in the 
description of the Queen's visit to Kenilworth, 
when she graced one with her presence. 
Doubtless, Mary Arden was married to John 
Shakespeare at Wilmecote in 1557 with such 
ceremony as this. First came sixteen lusty lads 
and bold bachelors of the parish on horseback, 
two by two, with blue buckram bride laces and 
branches of green broom (because rosemary was 
scanty) on their left arms, and sticks of elder- 
tree in their right. Among them was the 
bridegroom in a tawny worsted jacket, 'a fair 

263 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

straw hat with a capital crown, steeplewise 
upon his head,' and a pair of harvest gloves 
in his hand. After this band came morris 
dancers and three fair girls. A country 
bumpkin followed them with the bride cup; 
behind him walked the bride between two 
ancient parishioners, honest men, and she 
was accompanied by twenty-four damsels as 
brides-maids. 

Probably less ceremonious was Shakespeare's 
own marriage with Anne Hathaway, of Shottery, 
a hamlet within a mile of Stratford. The parents 
of both Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway dis- 
approved of the union, and there was certainly 
an awkward disparity of age between the two, 
he being but eighteen and she twenty-six. 
According to tradition, the marriage took place 
at Luddington, in a church which has now 
disappeared, and of which the schoolmaster 
at Stratford, Thomas Hunt, was curate. The 
licence, or 'bond against impediments,' pre- 
served in the Worcester registry, is dated 28th 
November 1582. Two respectable husbandmen 
of Shottery, Falk Sandells and John Richardson, 
attest it. But espousals had doubtless been 
quietly solemnised earlier, and Anne Hathaway 

264 







O <fl 



CHRISTENINGS AND MARRIAGES 

had then been betrothed to Shakespeare as 
his wife. Their first child was born in May 
1583.1 

There is an account extant of the cele- 
bration of a precontract, under similarly un- 
prepossessing circumstances, at Alcester in 
1588, where the contract took the place of a 
more regular marriage. The lady was present 
without any friends, and explained their absence 
by the statement that she thought she could not 
obtain her mother's goodwill, but nevertheless, 
quoth she, ' I am the same woman that I was 
before.' Her lover merely asked her * whether 
she was content to betake herself unto him, and 
she answered, offering her hand, which he also 
took upon the offer that she was content by her 
troth, and " thereto," said she, " I give thee my 
faith and before these witnesses, that I am thy 
wife," and then he likewise answered in these 
words, viz. " And I give thee my faith and troth, 
and become thy husband." ' This was doubtless 
the form that Shakespeare's betrothal took, and, 
although not very irregular for those days, 

1 For a full discussion of Shakespeare's marriage, see Joseph 
William Gray's Shakespeare's Marriage and his Departure 
froyn Stratford and other Incidents in his Life. London, 1905. 

2e 267 



STRATFORDON-AVON 

certainly caused many of his youthful em- 
barrassments. 

Richard Hathaway's cottage at Shottery, 
reached from Stratford by open paths across 
wide meadows, is still standing, and was pur- 
chased in behalf of the public in 1892 by the 
Shakespeare's Birthplace Trustees. Within 
the dwelling an ancient chair by the chimney 
corner and bacon cupboard in the parlour has 
long been called ' Shakespeare's courting chair.' 
The house is encircled by an old-fashioned flower 
and kitchen garden, and forms a picturesque 
relic of Elizabethan country life. Attempts have 
been made, with doubtful success, to detect 
resemblances to it in Celia's description of the 
cottage which she and Rosalind occupy in the 
Forest of Arden. The Hathaways had been 
small farmers at Shottery before the middle of 
the sixteenth century, and there were branches 
of the family settled at Stratford. In 1580, 
another Anne Hathaway had married Alderman 
Wilson there, and a Thomas Hathaway, son of 
Margaret Hathaway, died at Stratford in 1601. 
There is evidence to prove that Richard Hatha- 
way, Anne's father, who died in 1582, in the 
same year as Anne married, was, early in 

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CHRISTENINGS AND MARRIAGES 

Elizabeth's reign, on friendly terms with John 
Shakespeare, and it is probable that the poet 
met Anne at his father's house for the first time. 
That he had an affection for her quiet native 
village is shown by the fact that in 1598 he 
contemplated the purchase there of 'some odd 
yardland.' Probably the Richard Hathway, or 
Hathaway, who takes his place in the lower 
ranks of the dramatists of London early in the 
next century, was a near relative of the great 
dramatist's wife. 




OLD CHURCH OF LUDDINGTON. 



271 



XXIII 

SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD IN LATER LIFE 

It is no part of my present plan to trace the 
progressive career of Shakespeare as a dramatist. 
His life at Stratford as the woolstapler's son 
who ' went to London very meanly, and came in 
time to be exceeding wealthy,' is alone to be 
noted here. Nor will it be necessary to follow 
him in his journeyings to and fro the metropolis. 
His first journey was doubtless made in the 
covered waggon of the carrier who made weekly 
journeys, or on foot, but later he doubtless 
travelled on horseback. It was a common 
practice to hire horses for travelling at twelve- 
pence the first day, and eightpence a day after- 
wards, until they were returned to the owner; 
but Shakespeare could have afforded long before 
his death to ride a horse of his own. 

272 



SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD 

There were two routes between Stratford 
and London— one by Oxford and High Wy- 
combe, through Shipston-on-Stour, Chipping 
Norton, Woodstock, the Chilterns, Beacons- 
field, Hillingdon Hill, Hanwell, Acton, and 
Kensington ; the other by Banbury and Ayles- 
bury.^ Tradition points to the former route 
as Shakespeare's favourite road, and signalises 
the Crown Inn, near Carfax, at Oxford, as one 
of his resting-places, where he found ' witty 
company ' and a fair hostess with whom scandal 
will have it he made too free. Aubrey asserts 
that at Grendon, near Oxford, ' he happened 
to take the humour of the constable in Mid- 
suTYimer Night's Dream' — by which he meant, 
we may suppose. Much Ado about Nothing — 
but there were watchmen of the Dogberry 
type all over England, and probably at Strat- 
ford itself. Lord Burghley, writing to Wal- 
singham in 1586, described how on a long 
journey he saw the watch at every town's 
end standing with long staves under alehouse 
pentices, and how at Enfield they declared they 

1 For an interesting account of the journey by road from 
Stratford to London, see Professor J.W. Hales's Notes and Essays 
on Shakespeare (1884), pp. 1-24. 

273 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

were watching for three young men, whom 
they would surely know because 'one of the 
parties hath a hooked nose ' — a statement upon 
which Burghley makes the prudent comment 
that 'if they be no better instructed but to 
find three persons by one of them having a 
hooked nose, they may miss thereof.' The 
inns all along the Elizabethan country roads 
were famed for their comfort. 'The world 
affords,' writes one traveller, Fynes Morison, 
' not such inns as England hath either for good 
and cheap entertainment after the guests' own 
pleasure, or for humble attendance on pas- 
sengers; yea, even in very poor villages.' The 
host and hostess and the servants zealously 
attended to the needs of horse and man. What 
was left over from a guest's supper was care- 
fully preserved for his breakfast, his chamber 
was kept well cleaned and warmed, and a 
few pence was all that was expected by the 
chamberlain and ostler when the traveller left 
to pursue his journey. Up to the very last 
years of his life, Shakespeare paid frequent 
visits to London, and very often must he have 
hasted to his bed 'with travel tired' at an 
hospitable roadside inn. 

274 



SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD 

When Shakespeare left Stratford-on-Avon in 
1585, his wife and three children remained be- 
hind, but at no period is it probable that he 
was long separated from them. His fellow- 
townsmen at all times knew of his worldly 
prosperity, and were conscious of a desire on 
his part to stand well with them. Abraham 
Sturley, who was once bailiff, writing appar- 
ently to a brother early in 1598, says : ' This is 
one special remembrance from our father's 
motion. It seemeth by him that our country- 
man, Mr. Shakspere, is willing to disburse some 
money upon some odd yardland or other at 
Shottery, or near about us : he thinketh it a 
very fit pattern to move him to deal in the 
matter of our tithes. By the instructions you 
can give him thereof, and by the friends he can 
make therefore, we think it a fair mark for him 
to shoot at, and would do us much good.' To 
Richard Quiney, the father of Thomas Quiney, 
afterwards Shakespeare's son-in-law, who was 
staying in 1598 at the Bell, in Carter Lane, 
London, and endeavouring to relieve the town 
of the payment of a subsidy, Abraham Sturley 
also wrote, on 4th November 1598, that since 
the town was wholly unable, in consequence of 

275 



STRATFOKD-ON-AVON 

the terrible dearth of corn (' beyond all other 
countries that I can hear of dear and over 
dear'), to pay the national taxes, he hoped 
'that our countryman Mr. Wm. Shak. would 
procure us money, which I will like of, as I 
shall hear when, and where, and how.' Richard 
Quiney was himself harassed by debt, and had 
just before (25th October) addressed a like 
request to Shakespeare on his own behalf. 
' Loving countryman,' the application ran — 
and the manuscript, which is still extant, is 
the only surviving paper besides his will known 
to have been pressed by Shakespeare's own 
hands — 'Loving countryman, I am bold of 
you as of a friend, craving your help with 
xxxZ^. . . . You shall friend me much in help- 
ing me out of all the debts I owe in London, 
I thank God, and much quiet my mind, which 
would not be indebted. . . .' 

Shakespeare apparently maintained very good 
relations with his father, and the coat-of-arms 
granted to John Shakespeare in 1596 was 
undoubtedly the result of his son's exertions. 
John's own fortunes had long continued to 
decline. In 1587 an importunate creditor, 
Nicholas Lane, had made an attempt to dis- 

276 



SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD 

train on his goods, but found none on which 
he could lay hands. John had already in 1579 
mortgaged his estate of Ashbies at Wilmcote 
for forty pounds to Edmund Lambert, a family 
friend, and sold in 1579 some of his property 
at Snitterfield to Robert Webbe, yeoman, for 
four pounds. A vexatious lawsuit arose out 
of the mortgage of Ashbies. John Shake- 
speare, although hard pressed by other debts, 
offered in 1580, according to the agreement, 
to pay off the mortgage, but Lambert refused 
to relinquish the property. On his death in 
1597 his son continued in possession, and John 
Shakespeare endeavoured to deprive him, with 
what success is not known. In 1592 John 
Shakespeare was in worse plight: he was re- 
turned as a ' recusant.' Commissioners had 
come to Stratford to enforce the penalty of 
twenty pounds to which those who did not 
attend church once a month were liable. The 
appearance of Shakespeare's name in the list of 
defaulters has suggested that he was a Roman 
Catholic. But it was not merely a man's reli- 
gious opinions that kept him from church. The 
statute acknowledged the lawfulness of plead- 
ing in excuse not only 'age, sickness, and im- 
2f 277 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

potency of body,' but fear of creditors. It was 
doubtless under the last disability that John 
Shakespeare suffered. But throughout this 
troubled time he still lived in the old house in 
Henley Street ; and although he is said to have 
let out an adjoining tenement, he never parted 
with the copyhold of the property. In 1601 he 
died intestate, and William doubtless followed 
him to the grave. The poet, as the eldest son, 
inherited the houses in Henley Street, but his 
mother continued to live there till her death in 
September 1608. 

Five years before his father's death, another 
and a far sadder funeral had brought Shake- 
speare to Stratford. On 11th August 1596 there 
was buried in the parish church his only son, 
Hamnet, aged eleven. That loss must have 
tempered the satisfaction with which the creator 
of Arthur and Mamillius witnessed the trium- 
phant success that attended the production at 
the same date of his Romeo and Juliet, It 
was in the next year (1597) that he made his 
first purchase of landed property at Stratford, 
and bought the great house of New Place, with 
two barns and two gardens. For it he paid 
sixty pounds to William Underbill, gentleman, 

278 



SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD 

who had succeeded Alderman Bott in 1567 in 
its ownership. In May 1602 the poet purchased 
one hundred and seven acres of land to the 
north-east of the town, from the Combes, his 
wealthy neighbours; and on 28th September 
following he bought a cottage of one Walter 
Getley, adjoining his garden in Chapel Lane. 
In July 1605 he added largely to these pro- 
perties by buying for £140, ' the unexpired term 
of a moiety of the interest in a lease granted in 
1554 for ninety-two years of the tithes of Strat- 
ford, Bishopston, and Welcombe, subject to 
certain annual payments.' This was the last 
of the poet's Stratford purchases of real estate, 
all of which were completed before he was forty- 
two years old. 

There is further evidence that he occasion- 
ally traded in agricultural produce, as his father 
had done before him. In 1598 few of his neigh- 
bours owned more grain than he. Between 
March and May 1604 he sold one pound nine- 
teen shillings and tenpence worth of malt to 
one Philip Rogers, and lent him two shillings 
afterwards : six shillings of the debt were re- 
paid, but Shakespeare had to bring an action 
in the local court to recover the balance. The 

279 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

records of 1608 and 1609 show Shakespeare en- 
gaged in recovering another debt of six pounds 
from John Addenbroke. Shakespeare gained 
a verdict, but Addenbroke decamped, and made 
the success a barren one. But at that period 
Shakespeare was one of the richest men in the 
town. 

During these years Shakespeare was 
frequently passing to and from London, and 
while at Stratford he does not always seem 
to have resided at New Place. He rebuilt 
it, apparently of stone, in 1598, soon after 
purchasing it, and planted an orchard in the 
garden, of which the mulberry tree — planted 
about 1609 — was long a famous survival. 
Early in the seventeenth century the town- 
clerk, Thomas Greene, who claimed to be 
Shakespeare's cousin, lived in the house, but 
he removed about 1609. It has been sug- 
gested that between 1598 and 1607 Shake- 
speare and his family lived with his mother 
in the houses in Henley Street, which his 
father's death in 1601 had placed in his hands. 
In 1607 his eldest daughter, Susannah, mar- 
ried John Hall, a rising physician of puritan 
tendencies, recently settled in Stratford, who 

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SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD 

purchased a large house in Old Town. And it 
was there, according to some conjectures, that 
Shakespeare took up a temporary residence 
between 1607 and 1609. After the latter date, 
New Place was his permanent home, and he 
rarely left Stratford in subsequent years. He 
had many friends there. Old John Combe, of 
whose suspected usury he laughingly dis- 
approved, was living at the College. He saw 
much of the Quineys, his father's and his own 
acquaintances from youth. Next door to New 
Place was the well-built residence which seems 
to have been in the occupation, in Shakes- 
peare's day, of Henry Norman, at one time city 
chamberlain, whose widow lived there till 
1650. The tenement was, however, acquired 
soon after the poet's death by Thomas Nash, 
the first husband of Shakespeare's grand- 
daughter, and, although it was never occupied 
by him, was known thenceforward as Nash's 
house. In 1861 it was bought by the Trustees of 
Shakespeare's Birthplace, and now forms part 
of their New Place estate ; the ground floor has 
been converted into a public museum. The 
second house from New Place, a very sub- 
stantial building, which is also still standing, 

281 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

was inhabited in Shakespeare's day by Julius 
Shaw, who dealt regularly in wool, corn, and 
malt, and occasionally in wood and tiles. Shaw 
was a member of the town council in 1603, a 
chamberlain in 1609, an alderman in 1613, and 
bailiff in 1616. Shakespeare knew him well, 
and called him in just before his death to wit- 
ness his will. 

Relatives were also numerous in the neigh- 
bourhood. The house in Henley Street Shake- 
speare appears to have let (after his final 
removal to New Place) to his sister Joan and 
her husband, William Hart, who is described 
as a hatter. (There they brought up their 
three sons, the poet's nephews: William, born 
in 1600, Thomas, born in 1605, and Michael, born 
in 1608; and the occupiers of the house in the 
early years of the nineteenth century claimed 
descent from the Harts.) Shakespeare's 
brothers, Gilbert, three years his junior, and 
Richard, ten years his junior, lived at Strat- 
ford, and the former assisted him to complete 
some of his purchases of land. 

Visitors to Stratford doubtless knew the 
wealthy inhabitant of New Place. Old Sir 
Thomas Lucy had died at Charlecote, 7th July 

282 




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SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD 

1600, and his son and heir died three years 
later. But a third Sir Thomas Lucy, grandson 
of Shakespeare's early enemy, was diligent in 
the discharge of local judicial functions. In 
early life he had travelled on the continent 
with Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and was 
apparently a man of culture. He was often 
to be seen riding about Stratford. We know 
that in 1632 he conferred with Shakespeare's 
son-in-law, John Hall, on local business, and 
afterwards refreshed himself at the Swan Inn. 
There is every reason to _assume that he and 
the poet were known to each other. As much 
may be said of another great neighbour — Sir 
Fulk Greville of Alcester and of Beauchamp's 
Court, Warwick, a poet, a statesman, and the 
friend in early days of Sir Philip Sidney. A 
more congenial acquaintance was Michael 
Drayton, a native of Warwick and an ardent 
lover of the county of his birth. 

Shakespeare never coveted municipal office ; 
he was content to be merely Mr. Shakespeare, 
gentleman, of Stratford, and neither alderman 
nor bailiff. There is little reason to suspect 
that the cause of his neglect of this road to 
local fame is to be ascribed to any contempt 

285 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

on his part for its humble worth. It was due 
rather to the puritan atmosphere which was 
fast settling upon Stratford when he was in 
a position to avail himself of municipal 
honours. His father had evinced puritan 
leanings, with which his son was clearly 
never in sympathy. As early as 1564, when 
John Shakespeare was chamberlain, he paid 
two shillings 'for defacing image in chapel.' 
But it was some years before the puritan 
spirit laid a firm enough hold on the town 
council to induce them, as they did on two 
occasions in the early part of the seventeenth 
century, to consider ' the inconvenience of 
plays.' Shakespeare must have felt some 
amusement when the news was brought him 
from the council chamber, opposite New Place, 
that after very serious consideration the council 
resolved, on 7th February 1612, that plays 
were unlawful, and *the sufferance of them 
against the orders heretofore made, and against 
the example of other well - governed cities 
and boroughs'; and the council was there- 
fore * content,' the resolution ran, ' and they 
conclude that the penalty of xs. imposed [on 
players] be xZz. henceforth.' Ten years later 

286 



SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD 

the king's players were bribed by the council 
to leave the city without playing. The 
drinking of sack and claret by the burgesses 
did not cease, however, but it, too, was now 
directed to advance soberer causes than of 
old. The council began to invite puritan 
preachers to preach in the town and to take 
their pottle of wine and quart of sack, at 
the municipal expense, after the sermon. One 
of these incongruous entertainments was, 
singularly enough, celebrated in 1614 at 
Shakespeare's own house. ' One quart of 
sack and one quart of claret wine given 
to the preacher at New Place' is an item 
in the chamberlain's accounts for 1614. It 
was probably John Hall, the poet's son-in-law, 
who organised that gathering; or it may be 
that the preacher was personally attractive, and 
that the owner of New Place was anxious to 
make his acquaintance. Shakespeare, it should 
also be remembered, must have been a regular 
attendant at the parish church, and may at 
times have enjoyed a sermon. The pew which 
the residents at New Place occupied, called 
from its early owners the Clopton Pew, was 
near the pulpit on the north side of the nave. 
2g 289 



XXIV 

THE GUNPOWDER PLOT— COMBE's DEATH— THE 
ATTEMPT TO ENCLOSE THE WELCOMBE FIELDS 

Some stirring episodes disturbed Stratford in 
the dramatist's last days. In 1598 there were 
riots owing to the famine ; in 1602 * rogues 
were taken at Clifford,' amid much unexplained 
excitement, finally quelled by draughts of 
sack and Rhenish wine given to the towns- 
men at the municipal expense. In 1605 and 
1606 much consternation was caused in the 
neighbourhood by the Gunpowder Plot. Some 
of the leading conspirators lived near Strat- 
ford. At Clopton House, then the property of 
Baron Carew, William Clopton's son-in-law, 
lived Ambrose Rookwood, a chief abettor of 
the plot, and he received there many of 
his associates. Catesby lived near Lapworth. 
When the plot was discovered, the bailiff of 

290 




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Stratford was ordered to make an inventory 
of Rookwood's goods. He and many burgesses 
proceeded to Clopton House on 26th February 
1606, and found much Papist paraphernalia, 
which they duly seized.^ In the summer of 1614, 
a destructive fire worked much havoc in the 
town.^ 

A year later, on 10th July 1615, old John 
Combe of the College died, and was buried in 
the parish church with much ceremony. Some 
while before his death, he had, according to a 
doubtful tradition, asked the poet what ought 
to be his epitaph. Shakespeare replied with 
four lines, the sharpness of whose satire on 
Combe's 10 per cent, loans is said to have 
brought the friendship of the two to an end — 

Ten in the hundred lies here engraved, 

'Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved. 

If any man ask, Who lies in this tomb ? 

Oh ! oh I quoth the devil, 'tis my John-a-Combe. 

As a matter of fact, Combe's tomb bore an 
inscription recording his many charitable be- 
quests to the poor of Stratford, and by his 
will he left five pounds to ' Mr. William Shack- 

1 Cf. Professor Hales's Notes, etc., on Shakespeare, pp. 25-56. 

2 Stow's Annals, 1631, p. 1004, col. i. 1. 36. 

293 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

spere.' Other bequests prove Combe to have 
lived on intimate terms with all the neigh- 




!^. 'B.S4^^Sw 




MONUMENT TO SIR HENRY RAINFORD IN CLIFFORD CHURCH 



bouring gentry, including Sir Henry Rainford^ 
v^hose elaborate monument stands still in Clif- 
ford Church. 

294 



THE WELCOMBE FIELDS 

Combe was a favourable specimen of the 
new class of country landowners which the 
development of commerce had made numerous 
throughout sixteenth century England. His 
chief object in life was to secure a fortune, but 
he sought at the same time to stand well with 
his neighbours, especially with those in high 
social station. Speculation in land offered a 
ready means of attaining his two aims of 
wealth and social dignity. Land (as we have 
already noted ^) was in those days an invest- 
ment which could ensure a profit, but for this 
purpose it was necessary to apply it chiefly 
to grazing uses, and to secure wide areas. 
The agricultural labourer suffered under such 
masters. Little labour was required, and the 
agricultural population dwindled. A greed for 
great estates invariably characterised the new 
class of landowners. Small owners were ab- 
sorbed by large ones, and lands held in 
common by municipal corporations were con- 
stantly threatened with enclosure. If old John 
Combe did not himself exemplify the worst 
vices of the new system, he could not avoid 
inflicting some hardship on his poorer neigh- 

1 See pp. 126-7. 
295 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

bours; and his son and successor, William 
Combe, had far less consideration than his 
father for either the tillers of the soil or the 
townsmen of Stratford as owners of the 
common fields near his estates. Shakespeare 
certainly bore in mind the grievances of the 
South Warwickshire peasants when he made 
Oorin, the shepherd of the Forest of Arden, in 
his As You Like It, complain — 

But I am shepherd to another man, 
And do not shear the fleeces that I graze. 
My master is of churlish disposition, 
And Httle recks to find the way to heaven 
By doing deeds of hospitaUty. 

The evil influence of *the greedy gentlemen 
which are sheepmongers and graziers,' and 
are worse than ' the caterpillars and locusts 
of Egypt,' is a commonplace in the charges 
brought by those who under Elizabeth de- 
nounced the vices of the age. 'They have 
depopulated and overthrown whole towns, and 
made thereof sheep pastures nothing profitable 
to the commonwealth,' is the opening phrase 
of ' a petition of the Diggers of Warwickshire ' 
addressed 'to all other diggers' in the reign of 
James i. 

296 



THE WELCOMBE FIELDS 

The enclosure of the common fields attached 
to villages and towns was repeatedly attempted 
by the new landowners in the face of many 
prohibitory enactments, and often with com- 
plete success. This pillage of valued rights 
was always hotly resented, and often violently 
resisted. In May and June 1607 the peasantry 
of the midland counties, smarting under many 
such invasions of their privileges and pro- 
perties, were involved in something like a re- 
bellion. * People,' the proclamation issued to 
repress the disturbances ran, 'did assemble 
themselves in riotous and tumultuous manner, 
sometimes in the night and sometimes in the 
day, under pretence of laying open enclosed 
grounds of late years taken in to their domage, 
as they say.' In Warwickshire and elsewhere, 
says Stow, ' a great number of common persons 
. . . violently cut and broke down hedges . . . 
and laid open all such enclosures of commons 
and other grounds as they found enclosed.'* 
At Hill's Norton, in Warwickshire, the insur- 
gents assembled to the number of 3000, armed 
with spades, shovels, bills, and pikes. The 
leader, John Reynolds, was called Captain 

1 Stow's CJironicles (1632), p. 890. 

297 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

Pouch, because he pretended that a pouch 
which he was in the habit of wearing contained 
enough to feed any number of rebels. On sub- 
sequent examination there was only found in 
the pouch *a piece of green cheese.' Reynolds 
or Pouch asserted that he had authority from 
the king to overthrow enclosures. But when 
the agitators declined to disperse on the issue 
of a proclamation promising an investigation 
into their grievances, military force was em- 
ployed, and all the ringleaders were arrested 
and hanged. James i. expressed himself 
strongly against the enclosures and admitted 
the injury thus wrought on the poor labourers. 

After such disturbances in the peaceful neigh- 
bourhood of Stratford, it is surprising to find 
that William, John Combe's heir, had no sooner 
succeeded to his father's lands than he at- 
tempted to enclose the common fields about 
his estate at Welcombe, which undoubtedly 
belonged to the Stratford townsmen. In the 
autumn the corporation of Stratford first be- 
came aware of Combe's intention, and they 
resolved to offer it the sternest resistance. 

Shakespeare had some personal interest in 
the matter. He owned some neighbouring 

298 



THE WELCOMBE FIELDS 

lands as well as part of the tithes of the 
threatened fields. But he had small sympathy 
with popular rights, and when Combe's agent, 
Replingham, in October 1G14, formally drew up a 
deed engaging that he should suffer no injury 
by the enclosure, he threw his influence into 
Combe's scale. 

In November 1614 he was in London, and 
Thomas Greene, town clerk of Stratford -on 
Avon, who calls Shakespeare his cousin, al- 
though it is improbable that they were relatives, 
visited him there to discuss the position of 
affairs. 

On 23rd December 1614 the corporation 
assembled in formal meeting and drew up a 
letter to Shakespeare imploring him to aid them 
in the struggle. Greene himself sent to the 
dramatist ' a note of inconveniences [that] would 
happen by the enclosure.' But although an am- 
biguous entry ^ of a later date (September 1615), 

1 The words are 'Sept. Mr. Shakspeare tellj'ng J. Greene 
that I was not able to beare the encloseing of Welcombe.' 
J. Greene is to be distinguished from Thomas Greene the diarist. 
The entry tlierefore implies that Shakespeare told J. Greene 
that the writer of the diary, Thomas Greene, was not able to 
bear the enclosure. Dr. C. M. Ingleby published in 1885 a 
careful facsimile of the extant pages of Greene's diary (now 
preserved at Stratford) with a transcript by Mr. E. J. L. Scott 

2 H 299 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

in the few extant pages of Greene's ungram- 
matical diary has been tortured into an expres- 
sion of disgust on Shakespeare's part at Combe's 
conduct, it is quite clear that Shakespeare 
adhered to his agreement with Combe's agent, 
and tacitly supported him. Happily Combe 
failed. The corporation carried their case into 
the law courts, and the decision was in their 
favour. It is interesting to note that one of the 
disputed parcels of land, called then as now 
'the Dingles,' is still unenclosed and offers the 
wayfarer an admirable point of view from 
which to survey Stratford and the neighbour- 
ing country. 

of the British Museum. Mr. Scott showed that Greene's writing 
of this entry can only be read as we give it. Those who wish 
to make Shakespeare a champion of popular rights unjustifiably 
interpret the ' I ' in ' I was not able, etc' as ' he,' — in which case 
Shakespeare would have told Greene that he (i.e. himself) dis- 
liked the enclosure. But all the correspondence addressed to 
Shakespeare on the subject by the council makes it clear that 
he and they took opposite views throughout. 



300 



XXV 

Shakespeare's death and his descendants 

But before this dispute had reached its final 
settlement, Shakespeare's days came to a sudden 
close. He had welcomed the birth of his first 
grandchild, Elizabeth Hall, in 1608, the year of 
his mother's death. On 10th February 1616 
there took place the marriage of his second 
daughter, Judith, who was then thirty -one 
years old, to the son of Richard Quiney, of High 
Street, Thomas Quiney, who was four years her 
junior. The ceremony was performed without 
a licence, and some doubts as to its legality 
were subsequently raised. On 17th April the 
funeral of his brother-in-law, William Hart, the 
hatter, brought almost all the members of the 
family to the parish church. But it is doubtful 
if Shakespeare was present. 

A few days before, according to an ancient 

301 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

tradition, the poet was entertaining at New 
Place his two friends, Michael Drayton and Ben 
Jonson, and in the midst of the festivities was 
himself taken suddenly ill. Certain it is that on 
Tuesday, 23rd April, six days after Hart's burial, 
Shakespeare died, at the age of fifty-two. On 
Thursday, 25th April, he was buried near the 
northern wall of the chancel, by the door of the 
charnel-house, where the bones dug up from 
the churchyard were deposited. The poet, 
fearful that his bones should suffer this in- 
dignity, is said to have written for inscription 
on his tomb — 

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare 

To dig the dust enclosed heare ; 

Bleste be the man that spares these stones, 

And curst be he that moves my bones. 

According to the letter of one William Hall, a 
visitor to Stratford in 1691, recently brought 
to light, these verses were penned to suit ' the 
capacity of clerks and sextons, for the most 
part a very ignorant set of people ' ; had this 
curse not threatened them. Hall proceeds, they 
would not have hesitated in course of time to 
remove Shakespeare's dust to *the bonehouse,' 
where waggon -loads of bones were allowed 

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SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH 

to accumulate. The design, says the same 
authority, did not miss of its effect, for the 
grave was made seventeen feet deep, and was 
never opened, even to receive his wife, although 
she had expressed her desire to be buried with 
her husband. 

Thus Stratford was deprived of the inhabitant 
to whose ' wit ' its renown is due. The burgesses 
of 1616 gave no sign that they were conscious 
that death was taking from them one who left 
anything besides a substantial worldly fortune 
to invite their respect. The great bell of the 
church was tolled, the bailiff and aldermen 
joined the funeral procession, rosemary was 
freely strewn above the grave, and a liberal 
banquet was provided for the mourners. Every 
honour was paid by the poet's fellow-townsmen, 
but none of those who were his daily companions 
at Stratford guessed that he had already gained 
an immortal fame for work done outside their 
parish boundaries. 

Shakespeare's will, the first draft of which 
was drawn up in the January before his death, 
and the final draft by his bedside, was proved 
by Hall, in London, on the 22nd of June. To 
his youngest daughter, Judith, besides a portion 

305 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

of his landed property, he left £150, of which 
£100 was her marriage portion, and another 
£150 to be paid to her if alive three years after 
the date of the will. To his sister, Joan Hart, 
who had just become a widow, he left, besides 
a contingent reversionary interest in Judith's 
legacy, his wearing apparel, £20 in money, a 
life interest in the Henley Street property, and 
£5 to each of her three sons. To his grand- 
daughter, Elizabeth Hall, he bequeathed his 
plate, with the exception of his broad silver and 
gilt bowl, which was reserved for Judith Quiney. 
To the poor of Stratford he gave £10; to Mr. 
Thomas Combe (apparently a brother of John, 
of the enclosure controversy) his sword; and 
to a number of Stratford friends, and to his 
* fellows,' his partners in his theatrical specula- 
tions, John Hemyngs, Richard Burbage, and 
Henry Cundell, xxvjs. viijcZ. each, with which 
to buy memorial rings. To Susanna Hall, his 
elder daughter, he left, with remainder to her 
issue. New Place, almost all his land, barns, and 
gardens, and a house at Blackfriars, London. 
To his wife he gave only his second best bed 
with its furniture ; all the rest of his household 
stuff passed to John Hall and his wife Susanna. 

306 




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SHAKESPEAHE'S DEATH 

The executors were Thomas Russell 'esquier,' 
and Francis Collins, a solicitor of Warwick. 
That the second best bed should have been 
bestowed on his wife was, according to contem- 
porary notions, a mark of esteem, but that it 
should form the only bequest forms a strong 
argument in favour of the theory that the 
dramatist was not happy in his domestic life. 
His daughter Susanna was, according to his 
will, to take his wife's position as mistress of 
New Place. 

Soon after his death, certainly before 1623, 
an elaborate monument was erected to Shake- 
speare's memory in the chancel of the parish 
church. The services of a London sculptor 
and tomb-maker, Gerard Johnson, son of a 
native of Amsterdam, with a shop near St. 
Saviour's Church, Southwark, not far from the 
Globe Theatre, were called into requisition, 
and the inscription was apparently written by 
a London friend of the dramatist. The bust 
above the inscribed tablet is probably from a 
cast taken after death, and, though scarcely 
pleasing, is the most authentic memorial of 
the poet's features. The words run — 



309 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

Judicio Pyliuni, genio Socratem, arte Maronem^ 
Terra teg it, popuhis maeret, Olympus hahet. 

Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast ? 
Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath plast 
Within this monument ; Shakspeare, with whome 
Quick nature dide ; whose name doth deck ys tombe 
Far more then cost ; sith all yt he hath writt 
Leaves living art but page to serve his witt. 

Ohiit ano. doi. 1616. Aetatis 53, Die 23 Ap. 

Of Shakespeare's family, his wife died on 
6th August 1623, and was buried near her 
husband two days later. The Halls moved to 
New Place soon after the poet's death. John 
Hall increased his medical practice largely 
there, and his patients included the neighbour- 
ing gentry within a circuit of thirty miles. His 
Puritanism grew more confirmed and precise in 
later life, and he frequently quarrelled with his 
neighbours. He was buried in the chancel of 
the parish church on the 25th November 1635. 
His only child had been since 1626 the wife of 
Thomas Nash, and to his son-in-law Hall be- 
queathed by will ' his study of books.' This 
study, it has been reasonably conjectured, must 
have formed the library of his father-in-law. 
The books do not appear to have been quickly 

310 




SHAKESPEARE S 
MONUMENT. 



SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH 

removed from New Place, as his widow, who 
was still residing there, showed them in 1642 to 
James Cooke, a doctor professionally engaged 
at Stratford in the Civil War. He informed 
her that some manuscripts of her husband were 
among them, and offered to buy them of her, 
but this offer she declined, and disputed his 
opinion as to the authorship of the papers. Is 
it possible that some of her father's manuscripts 
were among them, or that she believed them 
to be? In any case, the information would 
have availed her little, for reading was not 
one of her accomplishments. Unhappily, no- 
thing is known of the later history of the 
papers. Mistress Hall died on 11th July 1649, 
and was buried near her husband. Her tomb 
bears the epitaph — 



Witty above her sexe, but that 's not all, 
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall ; 
Something of Shakespere was in that, but this 
Wholy of Him with whom she 's now in blisse. 
Then, Passenger, ha'st ne're a teare 

To weepe with her that wept with all ; — 
That wept, yet set herselfe to chere 

Them up with comforts cordiall ? 
Her love shall live, her mercy spread, 
When thou ha'st ne're a teare to shed. 

2 I 313 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

Judith, Shakespeare's younger daughter, lived 
on till 9th February 1662. Her husband, soon 
after their marriage, removed to the house 
called the Cage, at the Bridge Street corner of 
High Street, and v^as in business there as a 
vintner. He v^as a member of the town council 
from 1617 till 1630, v^hen he fell into evil habits, 
and v^as fined for swearing and encouraging 
tipplers. From that date his fortunes declined. 
He finally sought employment in London, and 
died there about 1652. Judith's married life 
was thus not a very happy one. Of her three 
sons, the eldest, named Shakespeare, died in 
infancy, and the other two on reaching man- 
hood, and she lived lonely at Stratford till 
death. The last surviving descendant of Shake- 
speare was his grand-daughter Elizabeth Hall, 
whose first husband, Thomas Nash, a resident 
at Stratford, a student of Lincoln's Inn, died 
in 1647. She married afterwards Sir John 
Barnard, a Northamptonshire gentleman, and 
died, without issue by either marriage, in 1670. 
With her second husband she lived for some 
years at New Place, which she inherited from 
her mother, but she subsequently resided at Sir 
John's house at Abington, near the town of 

314 




THE CHANCEL OF 
STRATFORD CHURCH. 



SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH 

IS^orthampton, and in Abington church there 
she was buried. Abington House, with the 
Park encircling it, is now the property of the 
corporation of Northampton, and is a public 
museum and recreation ground. New Place 
Lady Barnard bequeathed to her surviving 
husband Sir John, and soon after his death, in 
1674, it was repurchased by the Clopton family. 

It is unnecessary to pursue the history of 
Stratford beyond these points. Of the final 
fortunes of New Place, it only remains to tell of 
its reconstruction by a Hugh Clopton in 1703, 
before any authentic pictorial representation 
of its appearance in Shakespeare's day had been 
made, and of its ultimate demolition in 1759 by 
Francis Gastrell, a Cheshire vicar, who had pur- 
chased the place for a holiday home, to avoid 
the pertinacity of sightseers and the payment 
of local taxes. Since that fatal year the site of 
the house has remained vacant. Of structural 
changes which the public buildings of Stratford 
underwent since Shakespeare's day, the chief 
were the erection, in the seventeenth century, 
of a new Townhall, which was afterwards re- 
built, and the destruction of the College in the 

317 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

eighteenth century. As early as 1633 the muni- 
cipal offices were transferred to a new and 'lofty 
edifice' at the Sheep Street corner of Chapel 
Street, and the ancient Guildhall was thence- 
forth left untenanted. In 1769 the Townhall wa& 
completely rebuilt, and the new building, which 
still stands, was adorned, by the generosity of 
the great Shakespearean actor David Garrick,. 
with a sculptured memorial and a portrait of 
the poet, and with Gainsborough's painting of 
himself. 

The general historian of the county treats of 
the part played by the town in the civil war- 
fare of the seventeenth century, of the story 
of Queen Henrietta Maria's flying visit to New 
Place in 1643, and of the quartering of soldier& 
at the time in Shakespeare's dwelling-place^ 
The legal antiquary has described the grants 
of new charters to the town by Charles ii.,. 
and the reform of the corporation in 1835. Of 
the jubilees in honour of the poet which have 
been celebrated in the town since their inaugura- 
tion by Garrick in 1769, many records exist, and 
their somewhat barren history has been often 
told. More important is the fact that trustees- 
acting in behalf of the nation (who in 1891 were 

318 




THE CHAPEL OF 
THE GUILD OF THE 
HOLY CROSS. 



SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH 

incorporated by Act of Parliament under the 
title of the ' Trustees and Guardians of Shake- 
speare's Birthplace ') purchased the birthplace in 
Henley Street with the adjoining house in 1847, 
the vacant site of New Place with its gardens 
and the adjacent Nash's house in 1861, and 




STRATFORD, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST. 

Anne Hathaway 's cottage in 1892. All are now 
dedicated in perpetuity to public uses. The 
Memorial Buildings, which include a theatre, 
library, and picture-gallery, were erected by 
public subscription on the river-bank in 1879; 
and there about the date of the poet's birthday 
in April, an extended series of his plays is pre- 

321 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 

sented year by year. Such foundations are no 
unworthy, although in themselves necessarily 
inadequate, testimonies of a nation's gratitude 
to Stratford for having nurtured its king of 
poets. 

The origin of the town and its development in 
the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries 
alone afford a profitable study to the lover of 
Shakespeare. But even while studying them, 
it is useless to estimate exactly how much the 
dramatist owed to Stratford. We could point 
out in the various lists of the town's inhabitants 
the immortal names of Fluellen and Bardolf, of 
John Page and Thomas Ford, of Perkes and of 
Peto, and many more confirmations than appear 
in the foregoing pages of Aubrey's statement 
that 'he did gather the humours of men daily 
wherever he came.' We might depict Shake- 
speare seeking inspiration for the sylvan scenes 
of ^s You Like It beneath the trees of the 
Warwickshire Forest of Arden. We might 
press the theory that makes Lord Carew the 
lord of Taming of the Shrew and Clopton House 
the scene of Kit Sly's illusion. But it is wiser 
to take a larger view, and to be content to 
marvel how, in the aspect of the town and 

322 



SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH 

country, fair as the latter was and is, or how in 
the petty details of Stratford daily life, his 
mighty genius found adequate nourishment. 
It is vain to endeavour to solve this mystery, or 
to strive to indicate either in 'the world of 
living men,' or in 'wood, and stream, and 
field and hill, and ocean,' 

All he had loved and moulded into thought. 



THE END 



323 



INDEX 



Actors at Stratford, 206, 208. 
Alcester, 21, 267. 
Alfred, King, 66. 
Alveston, 25, 30, 31, 41. 
Arden, Agnes, 120. 

Alice, 121. 

■ ■ Mary. See Shakespeare, 

Mary. 

Forest of, 16, 21, 26, 268, 322. 

Ardens of Wilmeote, 80. 

Ascham, Roger, 189. 

Ashbies, 121, 277. 

Aston Cantlow, 38. 

As You Like It, 296, 322. 

Aubrey, 201, 273, 322. 

Avon, River, 15, 16, 21, 129, 175, 

224, 225, 227. 

Bacon, Francis, 129. 
Badger, George, 131, 132. 
Balsall, Dr. Thomas, 53, 54. 
Barnard, Sir John, 314, 317. 
Bidford, 16, 21, 176, 250, 253. 
Binton, 16, 58. 
Birmingham, 22. 
Birthplace, Shakespeare's, 131, 

281, 318. 
Bishopston, 25, 90, 100. 
Bott, William, 117, 127, 181, 279. 
Bridge, Stratford, 15, 104, 167, 176. 
Bridge Street, 45, 123, 132, 135, 181, 

210. 
Bridgetown, 31, 91. 
Burbage, James, 206. 

Richard, 206, 306. 

Burghley, Lord, 273, 274. 

Cage, The, 135. 
Catesby, 290. 
Celia, 268. 



Chapel Lane, 15, 80, 91, 117, 139, 144, 

162, 181, 279. 
Chapel of the Guild, 14, 62, 101, 

126, 137. 

Street, 15, 91, 137, 139, 143, 249. 

Charlecote, 204, 227 seq. 

Chaucer, QQ. 

Church, Stratford. See Holy 

Trinity. 
Church Street, 62, 67, 187. 
Clarence, George, Duke of, 78. 
Clifford, 25, 290, 294. 
Clopton, Charlotte, 171. 

Sir Hugh, 88, 97, 199. 

William, 117. 

Clopton House, 204, 293, 322. 

Cokain, Sir Aston, 255. 

Coke, his definition of a warren, 

241. 
College of Stratford, 53,99,138,293. 
Collingwood, Ralph, 54, 57. 
Combe, John, 100, 293, 295, 296, 298. 

William, 298. 

Comedy of Errors, 189. 
Cots wold Hills, 220, 225. 
Coventry, 219. 
Cundell, Henry, 306. 

Dalam, William, 101, 190. 

Danes, The, in Wessex, 25. 

Davies, Archdeacon, 244, 

Dennis, John, author of Secrets 
of Angling, 225, 226. 

Domesday Survey, 27, 29, 32, 36. 

Drayton, village in Warwick- 
shire, 58, 77. 

Drayton, Michael, 20, 30, 285, 302. 

Dugdale, Sir William, 13, 18, 20, 
30, 87. 



2 K 



325 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 



Dursley, 226. 

Eanulf, 25. 

Education in Elizabethan Times, 

189. 
Edward the Confessor, 30. 
Edward I., 67. 

II., 46. 

III., 47, 49, 67. 

IV., 53, 78. 

VI., 98, 101,103, 187. 

Egwin, Bishop, 23. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 100, 213, 235, 

237, 296. 
Ely Street, Stratford, 18, 139. 
Ethelred, King, 23. 
Evans, Sir Hugh, 198, 246. 
Evesham, 38. 

Fairs, 39. 

Falstaff, 245, 261. 

Field, Henry, 121, 152, 156, 205. 

Jasper, 206. 

Richard, 205. 

Fires, 175. 

Fisher, Thomas, 63, 93. 
Fladbury, 23. 
Floods, 205. 
Flower, Charles, 63. 
Foxe, John, 229. 

Games and Sports, 215 seq. 
Garrick, David, 166. 
Giflfard, Godfrey, 67. 
Gloucester Grammar School, 194. 
Grammar School, Stratford, 14, 

83, 101, 104, 181, 200, 205. 
Grafton, 77. 
Gray, Mr. J. W., 267. 
Greene, Thomas, 206, 280, 299. 

J., 299. 

Greenhill Street, 45, 130, 135, 143. 
Greet, 256. 
Gremio, 159, 160. 
Greville, Sir Edward, 259. 

Sir Fulk, 260, 285. 

Sir John, 82. 



Grey, Lady Jane, 99. 

Grumio, 159, 160. 

Guild, the Stratford, 62 seq., 101, 

103, 109, 126. 
Guild at Knoll, 128. 
Guildhall, 15, 80, 109, 167. 
Guy of Warwick, 26. 

Hales, John, of Snitterfield, 130. 

Professor J. W., 273, 293. 

Hall, Elizabeth, 306. 

John, 138, 249, 280, 285, 289, 

305, 306, 310. 

Susanna, 262, 280, 306, 313. 



Halliwell-Phillipps, Mr. J. O., Ill, 

166, 234, 247. 
Hamlet, 213. 
Harald, 26. 
Hart, Joan, 261, 306. 

William, 261, 282, 301. 

Hathaway, Anne. See Shake- 
speare, Anne. 

Richard, 268, 271. 

Heathored, Bishop of Worcester, 

23. 
Hemyng, John, 306. 
Henley in Arden, 10, 22, 45. 
Henley Street, 18, 45, 79, 123, 131, 

135, 143, 147, 151, 162, 182, 188, 

278, 280, 282. 
Henry III., 38. 

v., 53. 

VII., 229. 

VIII., 99, 100, 101. 

High Street, Stratford, 80, 125, 

137, 138, 143. 
Holof ernes, 191, 192, 197. 
Holy Trinity Church, 14, 40, 45, 

48, 137, 289. 
Hornebye, Richard, 132. 
Hundred Merry Tales, 211. 
Hunt, Thomas, Master of the 

Grammar School, 190, 191, 197, 

264. 
Hwiccas, 22. 

Ine, King of Wessex, 66. 



326 



INDEX 



Ingleby, 299. 

Ingon-by-Welcombe, 50. 

Inns, 135 ; The Bear, 135, 176, 210, 
259 ; The Crown, 135, 210 ; The 
Falcon, 249; The Red Horse, 
135 ; The Swan, 135, 210, 259. 

Jaques, 159. 

James i., 298. 

Jeaffreson, Mr. J. C, 63, 87. 

John of Stratford, Archbishop of 

Canterbury, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49. 
Jolyife, Thomas, 83. 
Jonson, Ben, 220, 250, 262, 302. 
Juliet, 172, 219. 

Kemble, J. M., 20. 
Kenilworth, 99, 201, 213, 236, 263. 

Leets, 109, 113. 

Leicester, Earl of, 201, 202, 213, 

235, 247. 
Leland, 15, 94, 132, 139. 
Long Compton, 204. 
Love's Labour 's Lost, 17, 113, 212, 

222. 
' Lucrece,' 159, 206. 
Lucy, Sir Thomas, 176, 204, 228 

seq., 259, 282. 
Luddington, 264. 
Lyttleton, Sir Thomas, 78. 

Malvolio, 188. 

Market Cross, 136, 137, 180. 

Markets and Fairs, 36, 125. 

Marlowe, Richard, 46. 

Mary, Queen, 99. 

Mercia, 10, 22. 

Merry Wives of Windsor, 245. 

Middle Row, 80, 135, 151. 

Midsuminer Nighfs Dream, 179, 

214. 
Milcote, 259. 

Moor Town's End, 45, 135. 
Much Ado About Nothing, 273. 



Naseby, 16. 

Nash, Thomas, 281, 310, 318. 



New Place, 15, 18, 91, 137, 166, 179, 

249, 278, 280-9, 306, 307, 318. 
Norman Conquest, 26. 

Offa, King of Mercia, 23. 
Oken's Charity, 124. 
Old Town, 24, 45, 138, 281. 
Orlando, 159. 

Page, William, 198. 
Petruchio, 159, 160, 263. 
Plagues, 169. 

QuiNEY, Adrian, 123, 162. 

Richard, 123, 275, 276, 281. 

Thomas, 123, 301. 

Quinton, 255. 

Rainford, Sir Henry, 294. 
Ralph of Stratford, Bishop of 

London, 44, 45. 
Richard i., 36. 

II., 68. 

Robert of Stratford, Bishop of 

Chichester, 44, 45. 

the Elder, 44, 67. 

Roche, Walter, Master of the 

Grammar School, 190, 191, 197. 
Rogers, John, 165. 
Rood Hall, 67. 
Rookwood, Ambrose, 290. 
Romans in Warwickshire, 21. 
Rosalind, 268. 
Rosaline, 113. 

Rother Market, 37, 125, 136, 139, 151 . 
Rowe, Editor of Shakespeare's 

Plays, 237. 

Sadler, John, 204. 
Savage, Richard, 63, 131. 
Scholar's Lane, 139, 162. 
Scott, Mr. E. J. L., 299. 
Seebohm, Mr., 27. 
Serving-men, 202. 
Severn, 16, 225. 
Shakespeare, the Surname of, 128. 

Anna, sister of the Poet, 261. 

Anne, 264, 268, 310, 314, 318. 



327 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON 



Shakespeare, Edmund, brother 
of the Poet, 261. 

Hamnet, son of the Poet, 

262, 278. 

Joan. See Hart, Joan. 

John, father of the Poet, 

115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 122, 127, 
129, 130, 132, 152, 162, 179, 184, 
208, 210, 213, 263, 277, 278, 286. 

John, Shoemaker, 123, 135. 

Judith, second daughter of 



the Poet, 123, 262, 301, 305, 314. 
Mary, the Poet's mother. 



120, 184, 263. 

Richard, brother of the 



Poet, 261, 282. 

Susanna. See Hall. 

Thomas, of Rowington, 128. 

William: Dugdale's refer- 



ence, 13 ; as the central feature 
of Stratford's history, 14-18 ; at 
Stratford Church, 54-58, 289; 
boyhood, 132, 183, 188 ; at New 
Place, 143, 166, 278, 281; his 
schoolmasters, 191 ; occupa- 
tions of his schoolfellows, 
201-206; witnesses his first 
theatrical performances, 209- 
214 ; knowledge of rural sports, 
215 ; tradition of his poaching 
at Charlecote, 227, 237; his 
supposed drinking contests, 
250 ; marriage to Anne Hatha- 
way, 264 ; journeys to and from 
London, 273, 280 ; purchases of 
land at Stratford, 278, 279 ; his 
reference to the Warwickshire 
peasants' grievances, 296 ; 
asked for aid by the corpora- 
tion, 299 ; death, 302 ; his will, 
309. 

Shallow, Justice, 42, 224, 244, 
246. 

Sheep Street, 139, 162. 

Shottery, 16, 264, 268, 275. 

Slender, 220, 245, 246. 



Sly, Christopher, 255, 256, 322. 

Snitterfleld, 16, 121, 127, 130, 277. 

Sponer, Richard, 181. 

Stinchcombe, 226. 

Stow, 297. 

Strype, 187. 

Studley, 21. 

Sturley, Abraham, 275. 

Sude, William, 66. 

Stratford-on-Avon, Origin of, 21. 

Taming of the Shrew, 159, 213. 
Thomas, Dr. William, 20, 
Thorpe, John, 231. 
Toulmin-Smith, Mr., 63, 87. 
Town Council, 107, 286. 
Trades, 202, 205. 
Travelling, 273. 
Twelfth Night, 212. 
Two Gentlemen of Verona, 212. 

Venus and Adonis, 206, 222. 
Villenage, 33, 43. 

Walker Street. See Chapel 

Lane. 
Warwick, 77, 129. 
Warwick, Earl of, 100, 187. 
Wearfrith, Bishop, 25. 
Wedgewood, William, 131. 
Welford, 16, 175. 
Welcombe, 22, 298. 
Whittington, John, 78. 
William i., 26, 28, 30. 
Willis, 209, 210. 

Wilmcote, 80, 91, 120, 215, 254, 263. 
Wilnecote, 255. 
Winchcombe, 286. 
Wincot, 255. See also Wilmcote. 
Wood Street, 125, 135, 136. 
Woodmancote, 226. 
Worcester, Bishops of, 22, 23, 24, 

25, 27, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 49, 82, 

98, 102, 187. 

Earl of, 208. 

Worcestershire Priory, 31, 32. 
Wulfstan, 26, 30. 



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